De Paula, NM; (1991) Capitalist farming in Brazil: An analysis of the strategies of accumulation on large holdings in the 1980s. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This study is basically a discussion of the strategies of capital accumulation in large holdings in Brazilian agriculture, specifically in the State of Parana. Despite the limits of economy of size and the physical constraints to expansion of capital towards land-based activities, large operations have been increased in agriculture, favoured by the conditions of access to land and its inherent market, by the characteristics of official policies and by the dynamics of specific activities, namely those linked to the external market. The analysis is particularly related to the 1980s, when the project of transforming the latifundio into rural enterprise, launched in the late 1960s, was at stake in an economic crisis which forced the government to withdraw from agriculture most of the financial benefits based on subsidised credit. As a consequence of this turning point, farmers' political organisations re-emerged to demand stable support from the state for an agriculture unable to face the crisis on its own. On the other hand, agricultural entrepreneurship showed itself to be largely specific, inasmuch as its income growth follows a very unstable process determined mainly by price variations of each commodity, by oscillations of the land market and by the returns provided by alternative investment in the urban economy. To a large extent, farming entrepreneurs, who represent agrarian capital, have, as part of their survival strategies, begun to loosen their links with land-based activities. Simultaneously, the conditions for agriculture becoming a field of investment attractive to capital have emerged from economic interests over landownership itself, from the protection provided by the state, and finally from the profitable returns of specific activities, mainly those linked to external market and the agroindustrial complex.

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