Fields of Gold by Madeleine Fairbairn

Author:Madeleine Fairbairn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

The history of Brazil’s attempts to regulate foreign land acquisitions is one of pendulum swings between more and less regulated land markets. There is, as Polanyi described, a perpetual tension between efforts to disembed land markets from all regulatory control and efforts to re-embed them in society via protective measures. What is striking in this case, however, is how dependent the regulatory framework is on the idea of the foreigner. The deregulation of the 1990s allowed for the unfettered capital flows required by neoliberal globalization but never ceased paying homage to a conceptual division between the foreign and the domestic. Rather than abandoning the foreign/domestic dichotomy, the deregulation was achieved simply by moving the border between the two categories, making it exceptionally easy to be Brazilian in the eyes of the law. Likewise, when the government wanted to take action against the land rush in 2010, it just moved that border back again, reclassifying foreign-owned Brazilian companies with the foreigners. The legal response to the land rush could have hinged on the issue of corporate landownership or on the increasing agricultural consolidation likely to result from large capital flows into rural land markets, but instead it was constrained by an exclusive preoccupation with foreigners.

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