The Political Ecology of Global Agribusiness and Chinese Investments in Brazil

In this seminar, I present my manuscript Brazil, China, and the Global Land Grab. Employing political economy and ethnographic methods, my book reveals how strategically positioned agribusiness professionals and government officials assemble Chinese capital with Brazilian land, labor, and expertise, and how these Sino-Brazilian agroindustrial partnerships are transformed by struggles for socio-environmental justice. Most narratives of Chinese “land grabbing” in Brazil assume this unfolds due to different distributions of “land per capita”, and suggest Brazilian agricultural exports to China (and Chinese investments to advance these in turn) simply follow natural comparative advantages. In contrast, my book denaturalizes these relations, disrupting neo-Malthusian assumptions about China’s need for imports for food security, and ecomodernist proposals for agroindustrial intensification in Brazil to attend global demand while “sparing land” for nature. Consequently, my scholarship reevaluates Chinese agribusiness investments in Brazil, critiquing the socio-ecological injustices that unfold as elites and urban consumers from Brazil and China benefit from the demise of indigenous and peasant livelihoods and the agro-ecological landscapes that are required for resilience to climate change. I then briefly outline new research projects that advance this scholarship in novel directions.

 

Dr. Gustavo Oliveira is assistant professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Irvine. He obtained a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley, and was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in environmental studies at Swarthmore College, and visiting assistant professor at Peking University’s College of Urban and Environmental Sciences. He has published 30 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and co-edited Soy, Globalization, and Environmental Politics in South America (Routledge, 2018), and Beyond the Global Land Grab: New Directions for Research on Land Struggles and Global Agrarian Change (Routledge, 2021). He is Co-PI of a national-level research project awarded $1 million by the National Institute for Food Agriculture to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on US food supply chains, and a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, an initiative of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.