Traditional life territories and the agribusiness sacrifice zone in the Cerrado

Abstract

The immense socio-biodiversity of the Brazilian Cerrado can be understood from the ways of life built by the wide range of traditional peoples and communities in their relations with the biome, of which they are guardians.In the last decades, development projects have promoted an accelerated advance in agribusiness, expropriating land, privatizing water, contaminating the environment and threatening or preventing traditional ways of life. In this essay, we start from the perception of women from Campos Lindos/TO, about the consequences brought to their lives and health by companies producing soybeans.Then we questioned the constitution of the Cerrado as sacrifice zone for Brazilian development, by concentrating land for production of  75% of four agricultural commodities, deforesting more than 50% of native vegetation, depleting aquifers and causing rivers to die, contaminating the environment with 73.5% of pesticides consumed in Brazil, with implications for the health-disease process (such as acute intoxications, malformations, cancers, malnutrition, mental illness) and other biomes in Brazil and South American countries.We conclude by examining alternatives in the perspective of the common, of degrowth, of rights of nature and of good living, instigating reflections from the Collective Health and Agroecology on the contribution of traditional knowledge,practices to health and human emancipation.