Soybean, a Commodity without Borders: Socio-Environmental Impacts in Protected Areas and Indigenous Communities in Mato Grosso do Sul/Brazil

Resumo

The occupation of the cone-south region of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul is not exclusively territorial, it is successively temporal and depends on public and private social actors, who build, elaborate, and provide conditions for the existence of the dynamics that are established there. The economic spatial expansion, especially for agricultural and cattle raising activities, attracts capital to change land use, intensifying the pressure on more vulnerable areas, such as conservation units and indigenous lands. The main change in land use and cover observed in the last 30 years was the loss of native vegetation inside conservation units (-29%) and indigenous lands (-34%) and the conversion of pasture areas, which had a reduction of 76% and 38%, to plant soy, which increased 536% and 98% inside indigenous lands and conservation units, respectively. Thus, it is clear that delimiting a conservation area or circumscribing traditional populations in a small area without resources prevents them from reproducing their way of life and, paradoxically, induces them to develop predatory practices against the environment or to lease their lands to large landowners, as the only means of guaranteeing their subsistence and not falling into poverty. This study highlights the urgent need to rethink territorial policies to ensure sustainable and socially just land use models.