Suchergebnisse

Brazil-China agricultural trade mushroomed since 2000 to become one of the world's largest flows of agroindustrial commodities and capital, reigniting and transforming agrarian questions in a new, multipolar world order. After the conjunction of food price and financial crises in 2007-2009, this burgeoning trade gave rise to a very palpable boom of Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness. My dissertation is the most in-depth and extensive study to date about this phenomenon, and its background in historical relations between Brazil and China. As this growth of Chinese investments abroad took place, a broader rush of investments in farmland and agroindustrial production, processing, trade, and infrastructure unfolded worldwide (often called the global land grab) – and China was identified as a major new investor, while Brazil was recognized as one of the foremost targets for transnational agroindustrial investments. State and corporate actors across both China and Brazil promoted this leveraging of investments as a new form of South-South cooperation, claiming it strengthens domestic agribusinesses and governments in these countries in relation to the hegemonic agribusiness and state interests from the Global North. On the other hand, some critics feared this new wave of investments establishes a neocolonial relation that deindustrializes Brazil, dragging it back to an extractivist and export-oriented agriculture that curtails employment and the standard of living of Brazilians, and locks the country economically into dependent international relations. In this dissertation, I set out to investigate where and how Chinese investments are taking place in Brazilian agribusiness (both direct and indirect, targeting everything from seeds, agrochemicals, and other inputs, farmland and agricultural production, agroindustrial processing, and the related logistics infrastructure such as warehouses and ports). My findings indicate that Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness did expand rapidly in recent years, but they are still far dwarfed by capital from the Global North – particularly in farmland and agricultural production. The prominent discourse that "China is a (or the) major land grabber" is debunked, and I argue it has actually been constructed through a complex conjuncture of social interests that range across rural social movements, commercial farmers, landed elites, and industrialists in Brazil, alongside agribusinesses and financiers from the Global North. This indicates also a form of sinophobia, which I argue must be understood in its 200-year history of shifting and sedimented Orientalist discourses about the Chinese in Brazilian (and other "Western") imaginaries. Tracing a genealogy of this sinophobia, I also reconstruct the emergence of a transnational class of boosters, brokers, bureaucrats, and (agri)businessmen (mostly men), who I call collectively "agribusiness professionals." I argue these agribusiness professionals have not only been at the forefront of constructing Brazil-China relations for over 200 years, but also it is examining their work of assembling Chinese capital with Brazilian land, labor, and expertise that we can comprehend the nature and denouement of Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships. Thus, I combine political economic and historical methods with a critical global ethnography of the transnational agribusiness professionals assembling Chinese capital with Brazilian agribusiness – rooted in in-depth interviews, life histories, and some participant observation undertaken from the fall of 2010 through the spring of 2017. This period included fieldwork in China during the summers of 2011 and 2013, and the spring of 2015. In Brazil, fieldwork was undertaken during the summer of 2012, and between January 2014 and August 2015. In total, I spent over 20 non-consecutive months undertaking fieldwork in Brazil and 7 non-consecutive months in China, working in about 14 Brazilian states and 8 Chinese provinces (and provincial-level cities). This research reveals that Chinese agroindustrial capital is not homogeneous, centralized, or directed "from Beijing", and rather than treating it as a "global force" that has "local impacts" in Brazil, I reveal how Chinese and Brazilian agribusiness professionals co-produce the emerging Brazil-China agroindustrial assemblage in the pursuit of their own affluence and influence. On one end of the spectrum, there are companies and projects that I term "Paper Tigers." These are companies that invested (or attempted to invest) primarily in farmland and agricultural production, and so were feared to be menacing land grabbers, but nevertheless turned out to be quite ineffective. Through a combination of insufficient financial and political resources, inadequate operational capacity among agribusiness professionals, and social resistance across various scales, these Paper Tigers either failed to operate profitably or even establish themselves in the first place. On the other end of the spectrum are companies I call (adapting a term from the Chinese government's recent policies) "Dragon Heads." These are companies that play leading roles in their sectors domestically, and launched foreign investments primarily through global-level mergers and acquisitions (M&As) of existing transnational or local (i.e. Brazilian) companies, focusing primarily on agroindustrial trade. While these indirect investments through M&As actually amount to the largest influx of Chinese agroindustrial capital into Brazil, and show clear signs and potential for converging with the agribusiness corporations from the Global North that had hegemony over much of Brazilian and transnational agroindustrial assemblages, this is still an underexplored phenomenon. A central contribution of my dissertation is discerning Chinese agribusiness investments in Brazil as Dragon Heads or Paper Tigers, showing this to be a much more useful lens for analysis than simple categorization across ownership structure as private companies or state-owned enterprises. My main argument is that, whether Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships collapse as Paper Tigers or advance as Dragon Heads, these projects ultimately benefit the transnational agribusiness professionals who assemble them above all others. While transnational agribusiness professionals cultivate their own wealth and power through these projects, they also aggravate the exploitation of natural resources and workers, and the marginalization of peasants and agroecological alternatives. Therefore, what I call the "South-South question" – how Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships constitute new linkages of agroindustrial capitalism within and between these previously-peripheral spaces that emerge now as new hubs of capital, and with what implications for the society and environment, particularly struggles for democracy and social justice – brings into the spotlight this group of agribusiness professionals as the key intellectuals (in the sense that Gramsci used in his examination of the "southern question") who construct capitalist hegemony through transnational agribusiness development. In turn, the struggle for democracy, land redistribution, agroecology, agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and social justice must contest this intellectual and political terrain of transnational agribusiness professionals. Agroecological alternatives for Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships exist, and are illustrated in the conclusion of this dissertation, but their pursuit is fundamentally a project of internationalist class struggle – uniting peasants, workers, and their allies in both China and Brazil against an increasingly transnational capitalist class.

Resumo Nos últimos 30 anos, diversos movimentos sociais brasileiros apostaram na tática da ação institucionalizada; e muitas foram as análises sobre interação socioestatal no período. Essa espécie de encantamento com a capacidade democrática do Estado brasileiro entregou menor importância às experiências de exercício democrático registradas na sociedade civil. No entanto, tal abordagem parece perder forças depois do Golpe de 2016 e da ascensão de Jair Bolsonaro à Presidência da República. Partindo de uma investigação mais ampla, o objetivo deste esforço foi o de explorar os períodos pré e pós-encantamento, no âmbito da trajetória do Movimento da Economia Solidária Brasileira, a fim de compreender como se dá o exercício da democracia para além ou apesar do Estado. Conclui-se que, tendencialmente, a ideia de autonomia-como-práxis-democrática poderia contribuir à elucidação de um tipo de democracia centrado na dupla território-comunidade, no qual autogestão e auto-organização importam mais do que a disputa democrática no âmbito do Estado.

Desde el 2003, con la llegada del Partido de los Trabajadores (PT) al Gobierno Federal, se ha percibido en Brasil una cercan?a notable y comprometida de la sociedad civil al Estado. Se expand?an las existentes y surg?an las nuevas instituciones de participaci?n social ?o instituciones participativas?, y atento a ello, el movimiento de econom?a solidaria busc? la ocupaci?n de estos espacios. El texto se plantea revisitar los conceptos de instituciones participativas para que sea posible entender c?mo estas han operado sus acciones en la pr?ctica y comprender su efectividad sobre la participaci?n en s?. Por lo tanto, se propone a identificar las instituciones participativas adscritas a la econom?a solidaria, a entender cu?l es la funci?n propuesta por el Estado para estas instituciones, as? como a analizar y a comprender si el movimiento de econom?a solidaria est? accediendo a estos espacios de forma efectiva. Se puede concluir que ya hay diversas instituciones participativas vinculadas a la econom?a solidaria y que, en el municipio de Canoas (en el departamento de Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil), el Foro Municipal de Econom?a Solidaria ha tenido papel determinante en la divisi?n del poder decisivo entre el Estado y la sociedad civil; sin embargo, a?n hay mucho por avanzar hacia una democracia participativa efectiva en el municipio y en el pa?s.

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the seemingly contradictory policies adopted by the Brazilian state to prevent land grabs in one region while encouraging agribusiness investments in another. The government recently initiated a programme intended to regularize titles of 300,000 homesteaders in unassigned public land in the Amazon region. This effort in state making over a largely illegible landscape is aimed at offsetting large‐scale illegal land grabs and ongoing (though significantly curtailed) deforestation. In contrast, legal large‐scale agribusiness investments are exacerbating deforestation and the concentration of land ownership in the Cerrado region through well‐established state mechanisms. While the imposition of legibility may regulate land concentration and degradation, legible landscapes also facilitate investments that drive both concentration and degradation. The author argues that the regularization programme undertaken in the Amazon structures land grabbing nationally — not because large amounts of public land are in fact being privatized through regularization, but because it actively undermines land redistribution programmes elsewhere in the country and consolidates transportation and production infrastructure in the Amazon–Cerrado transition zone. The state‐making framework developed here captures the heterogeneity of global land grab processes, indicating the ways in which these are obstructed but not discarded by different government agencies, stalled but not yet overturned by Brazilian civil society.

Purpose
This paper aims to present the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method in an accessible language to a broad research audience from a variety of management-related fields.


Design/methodology/approach
The paper describes the DiD method, starting with an intuitive explanation, goes through the main assumptions and the regression specification and covers the use of several robustness methods. Recurrent examples from the literature are used to illustrate the different concepts.


Findings
By providing an overview of the method, the authors cover the main issues involved when conducting DiD studies, including the fundamentals as well as some recent developments.


Originality/value
The paper can hopefully be of value to a broad range of management scholars interested in applying impact evaluation methods.

O Objetivo central deste artigo é apresentar a proposta da Operação Pan-americana na narrativa do Itamaraty articulada à política externa do governo Juscelino Kubitschek, visando entender quais eram seus objetivos e o porquê da sua formulação. A década de 50 na história do Brasil foi um período de grandes turbulências e mudanças, tanto no cenário nacional quanto no internacional. Analisaremos o governo Juscelino Kubitschek e os antecedentes da Operação Pan-Americana, bem como a documentação existente do Ministério das Relações Exteriores, apresentando a narrativa do Itamaraty para justificar a formulação da Operação Pan-americana dentro do governo JK, introduzida como política autônoma que tentava projetar e defender os interesses do Brasil.

From a document corpus taken from leading journals recording the discourses and actions of President Jair Bolsonaro and his team in managing the economy, politics, and the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more than clear that this administration refuses to play by the rules of the democratic game. There is a close relationship between the authoritarian administration and the naturalization of a logic that prioritizes market interests above all, producing an ultra-neoliberalism that not only operates within the economic and financial sphere but also produces antidemocratic modes of social subjectivity. Segundo um corpus de documentos proveniente dos jornais principais que registravam os discursos e ações do Presidente Jair Bolsonaro e seu equipe com respeito a sua gerência da economia, da polítca e da pandemia do COVID-19, fica muito claro que este governo se recusa a cumprir as regras do jogo democrático. Ademais, existe uma relação íntima entre o governo autoritário e a uniformização de uma lógica que prioriza os interesses do mercado sobre todo, produzindo um ultra-neoliberalismo que não somente opera dentro da esféra econômica e financeira mas também gera modos antidemocráticos de subjetividade social.

Afirmar y reproducir la vida humana es un acto colectivo, jamás individual, aunque las dinámicas, producto de la etapa actual del sistema social capitalista —el neoliberalismo de acumulación ilimitada—, intenten probar lo contrario. Superar a) epistémicamente las ideas de desarrollo que construyen subjetividades alienadas, b) las relaciones de trabajo asalariado —explotación económica— y, c) el Estado como única forma factible de organización de la vida en común —dominación política— nos parece un camino potencial hacia una forma de vivir que no explote y domine a los seres humano y que se (re)integre en la naturaleza. Nuestro objetivo en este texto es reflexionar sobre la idea de interdependencia como forma de satisfacer las necesidades materiales hacia una afirmación y reproducción de la vida en común en la que la autogestión y la autonomía se integran bajo la idea-fuerza-forma del autogobierno popular-comunitario, en contra de las dinámicas fragmentarias de la forma Estado-capital.