A concentração fundiária no Brasil: ineficácia do ITR e os impactos no campesinato sob a perspectiva de gênero, raça e classe

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the origins of Brazil's territorial formation in order to better understand a possible tendency towards land concentration intensified by a supposed modernization of productive relations in the countryside, investigating its impact on the most vulnerable part of these relations, the peasantry, with a specific focus on the categories of gender, race and class and debating the reasons for the ineffectiveness of the Rural Land Tax (ITR) as an active land policy instrument capable of discouraging the maintenance of large estates. In the first chapter, the methodology used was historical-dialectical materialism to unravel the political-economic relations of Brazil's colonial formation and then to characterize the later stage of development of dependent capitalism in the country, based on Marxist studies on the Dependency Theory. Next, the descriptive-explanatory method was then used to first present the constitutive points of the ITR and then to investigate the reasons for its low extra-fiscal performance in discouraging the maintenance of large estates, revealing problems in terms of unsatisfactory inspection by the government, the use of outdated indices to calculate productivity, as well as devices that cause confusion and contradict the provisions of environmental legislation.Finally, an overview was drawn up of the Brazilian land structure and the profile of rural workers in terms of race and gender, in order to understand the different ways in which land concentration affects the Brazilian rural population. As a result, it was possible to perceive the insufficiency of the ITR and the active devices designed by the Brazilian fiscal state to guarantee the social function of property and the implementation of a land policy that promotes distributive justice in the countryside, maintaining practically unchanged the scenario of land concentration in the hands of a rural oligarchy whose objectives reflect the imperatives of expanding Brazilian dependence.