Agriculture and capitalism in the Amazon: contradictions, crisis and limits of the expansion of the agroindustrial frontier on the horizon of the 21st century

Abstract

This article deals with agriculture in the Amazon - from the agro-industrial frontier to the peasant family economy - in the economic-social-ecological dispute over Nature. The characteristics of the hegemonic model of agriculture are discussed, its economic and ecological consequences, the changes generated by interventions in ecosystems from a social-natural whole. The dialectical-critical, material-systemic method is used, quantitatively exploring important literature. The research results allow us to point to the almost complete absorption, subsumption and dominance of agriculture by industry, under an annihilating society, which extends its annihilation from the center to the frontier. Substitutionism engulfed and dissolved the primary sector of the economy and deeply assimilated it, forming a mega sector called the agro-industrial complex under the command of capital. Industrialized agriculture, however, poisons and degrades soils, forests, waters, biodiversity, in addition to destroying people and cultures. However, it remains increasingly dominant and ascendant, defining the meaning and direction of development of the agricultural frontier in the Amazon, contributing to the carbonization of the economy, ecological destruction of ecosystems, intensification of social conflicts and the rise of violence in the countryside.