Determinantes socioambientais como foco para demarcação territorial: o caso da Comunidade Quilombola Saco Barreiro Pompéu/MG

Abstract

This study provides an analysis of a socio-environmental conflict in the municipality of Pompéu/MG between the Maroon Community of Saco Barreiro and Agropéu (Agroindustrial of Pompéu S.A), a producer company of ethanol and sugar. Currently located in a territory of approximately 10 hectares and surrounded by 20,000 of sugarcane, whose boundaries between one and another do not exceed ten meters, the maroons denounce that they have suffered several negative impacts from agroindustrial activities for more than three decades, since the installation of the project in 1981 and its consequent expansion in later years. Among the main complaints, they highlight the difficulties to access their natural resources historically used; fear of water contamination, soils, creations and plantations due to the application of agrochemicals and related by the company; and the one highlighted by the residents as being the main one: fear of being poisoned, given the complaints of malaise, headaches, burning eyes, skin irritation, among others, whenever these products are applied. All these factors and others that will be present contribute to the risky situation that the community is facing, having their traditions and ways of life interrupted, as well as having their life (organic and non-organic, life as an ethnical group) threatened. Given this scenario, the main objective of this work is to present the socioenvironmental determinants that should be fundamentally taken into account in the territorial demarcation of the community, which is underway in INCRA since 2009. By socioenvironmental determinants its understood the factors that currently influence the quality of the environment as a whole (water, soil, air) and interfere within the community's ways of life (conditions of reproduction in space, possibility of carrying out traditional activities, etc.), which consequently affects the territory and territorialities of the group. In this sense, it is understood that demarcating the territory, but not ensuring its full use through a totally healthy environment, identifying and eliminating the main threats outside the community, is not enough to guarantee the traditions formerly practiced in/on it. To accomplish this objective, visits were made to the quilombo (place where they live) and Agropéu; interviews with the maroons, employees of the company and the mayor of the city; production of social cartography and bibliographic research. The results indicate that the main socioenvironmental determinants are consequences of the Agropéus close presence to the community, presenting the need to think in a territorial demarcation that guarantees the distance between the maroons and the company, in a way that the claimed territory can be fully utilized, ensuring the return of the traditions and health of the population.