ABSTRACT
In Northern Mato Grosso, the expansion of the soybean agribusiness caused deep transformations of economic, social and territorial structures. This is especially true for the BR-163 corridor. Under the influence of a highly modernized and globalized production system, regional and local actor constellations, social and power relations, as well as the societal relations with nature have been subject to profound changes. Due to the specific character of the soy business – local–global entanglement, high degree of mechanization, frequent use of different urban-based services – rural–urban relations are submitted to specific reconfigurations: Increasingly, new regional centres and “agro-towns” such as Sinop, the case study of this contribution, exert the function of powerful multi-purpose “command centres” whereas the countryside is more and more reduced to serve as a “production machine”. These constellations influence local perceptions and discourses of the need for, as well as the feasibility of a social–ecological transformation.
This contribution is based on extended fieldwork in the Sinop region (surveys, expert interviews, thematic mappings) and aims to scrutinize determining elements of the regional “societal relation with nature” in order to uncover, in this way, the potentials and blockades for a (regional) social–ecological transformation.
