Mapping and analysis of territory of sugarcane agrohidrobusiness in the Pontal do Paranapanema region-São Paulo State-Brazil: labor relations, conflict and land and water use and environmental health

Abstract

This project presents the development of a critical approach to questions related to agricultural energy, water and land use, and workers' health in the Polígono Agrohidronegócio (Hydroagricultural Business) context by analyzing the expansion of the sugar cane agricultural-industrial capital in Sao Paulo State and the intensive effects on Pontal do Paranapanema. It considers the correlation between the water and land use and the legalization of illegal occupancy of landed property on the hydro-agricultural business part, as well as its development to the political actions around the Agrarian Reform, and issues connected to labor geography. An emphasis is given to the concentrative model of land, income and capital which reveals the environmental and social failures, causing great deal of tension of several imbricated processes upon the labor ways of expression, environmental health and water resources management. Thus, the project aims at new theoretical references in order to break the inveterate fragments of studies on the dynamics of society and nature. Similarly, from the methodological point of view, it intends to develop methodologies of mapping and usage of geo-technologies to understand labor movement, nature movement, and health movement within land disputes; it also offers alternatives to sustainable development. Facing this challenge, it is intended to understand the content and the meaning of social conflicts, without ignoring issues related to food and energy independence as well as to environmental sustainability. Therefore, it is appropriate to deepen the study of ways of management and control of water, and labor relations, as well as their harmful side when considering disease transmission, environmental pollution, workers' mutilation and death since they offer a great possibility to discuss the social invisibility of diseases related to work in Brazil, specially in energy-agricultural activities. The core issue is to understand the destructive development of the productive forces and show that globalized capitalism represents an intensive and contradictory movement of integration, fragmentation, and polarization that constantly reshapes the differentiation of social spaces.