Campo e rural idílicos como falácia: minério-dependência, incompletude urbana e injustiça ambiental-hídrica em Brumadinho (MG)

Abstract

Brasil has opted, during the first years of the 21st century, for the reprimarization of its economy. The consensus on this economic model, on its several scales, proceeded from the application of the neoextractivism, given the State’s appeal during this period, to several strategies that legitimated the option of repositioning itself as a commodities supplier within the International Division of Labor. Since then, the manpower and the environmental exploitation in a highly financial context had deepened. The legitimization of activities as devastating as mining has prevailed in municipalities such as Brumadinho as a result of a poverty scenario in terms of income and low diversity of economic activities, which is aggravated by the sparse incentives on the agricultural activities, associated with the devaluation of the countryside, the rural and its inhabitants, represented as synonyms of delay. Brumadinho’s municipality is located on the Iron Quadrilateral region and it’s part of Belo Horizonte’s Metropolitan Region composing, with Nova Lima’s municipality and others, the south vector of the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region’s expansion, which is characterized by a highly segregating process of space production. The research object was built before this apparently paradoxical space production dynamics between the urban of Belo Horizonte’s metropolis, and the rural of ore-dependency, tracing as the main goal, the comprehension of the impacts, of the transformation, of the conflicts, and of the adaptation in the relations stablished among the countryside, city, rural and urban, resulting from the constitution still unfinished of the urban society. One of the remarkable aspects of the space production on the south vector of Belo Horizonte’s Metropolitan Region, with implications on the Brumadinho’s municipality, is related to the representation of the countryside and the rural that composes it in an idyllic way. The critical analysis of the proposals around the “new rural”, presented as a bibliographic review confronted with the countryside in Brumadinho, indicated a total detachment of this theoretical framework with reality. It contributes to affirm that remains valid the interpretation that the agrarian-mercantile-exporter elite, metamorphosed into a range of several positions, holds a hegemonic position, in the case of Brazilian spatial formation. The representation of the idyllic countryside and rural, as well as its materialization, has the abundant availability of water as one of its central elements. However, idyllic countryside and rural production does not occur without conflict, and the water dispute seems to occupy a central place with strong traces of environmental-water injustice. Conflict that has become even more serious as a result of the groundwater collection of Serra da Moeda by the Coca Cola FEMSA company installed in the industrial district of Itabirito. Finally, the idyllic countryside and rural production in the context of ore-dependency, despite proposing to solve the problem of subordinate conditions of countryside residents, dissimulates several real purposes, and may contribute to aggravate the environmental injustice.