Mineração, agricultura e sociedade: o caso de Parauapebas, Amazônia Brasileira.

Abstract

Many municipalities whose main activity is mining, seek other sources of wealth generation due to its finite character. Traditionally, the first way of thinking about economic diversification of mining areas is agriculture, due to its vocation to meet the primary needs of consumption and food security. Taking into account the above scenario, the present study aimed to evaluate whether the main mining municipalities in the states of Pará and Minas Gerais, the largest producers of ore in Brazil, are managing to develop modern agriculture and growth in the volume produced so that the activity can serve alternative to reduce the high economic dependence on mining. To reach the objective of the research used as a method the investigation in official data of values received by the cities in the form of CFEM (Financial Compensation for the Exploration of Mineral Resources) and that has as one of the legal obligations the application of resources in the economic diversification. Subsequently, the growth rates of rural production in the municipalities were calculated and an agricultural modernization index of mining municipalities (IMA) was elaborated through a factor analysis. It could be seen that although cities receive a large volume of financial resources that should support other economic activities such as agriculture, the activity contributes little to the GDP of the largest mining municipalities in Pará and Minas Gerais, which is explained by low levels of productive modernization. and productivity that generated low rates of production growth, leaving clear signs of the occurrence of the Dutch disease in these territories.

The present work aimed to demonstrate how mining is capable of generating opportunities and at the same time weakening agriculture, thus compromising local food production. For this, the city of Parauapebas, the largest mining municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, was used as an object of study. The research was carried out with a quantitative and qualitative approach and firstly, 1016 interviews were carried out with the city's inhabitants to discover the value of the local food market. Subsequently, 32 interviews were carried out with managers of food companies and 20 leaders of producers in the rural area of the municipality. Finally, official reports and statistical series were consulted to demonstrate the degree of public and private investments in the city's agriculture. It was possible to conclude that, from the resources coming from mining, the city has a great public and private promotion to agriculture, however the activity continues to have little expression in the representativeness of the Gross Domestic Product of the municipality. The local consumer market has high demand and some foods are consumed above the national average, but most of the time the rural area of the city cannot represent even 10% of the total amount of food purchased by local companies. The quantity produced and the quality of the products are the main problems in the view of buyers and the lack of organization of producers in associations and cooperatives is the main weakness from the point of view of rural leaders.

This work evaluates the degree of knowledge of the population of Parauapebas – the largest mining municipality in the state of Pará – about receiving the Financial Compensation for the exploitation of mineral resources (CFEM) and about the mandatory environmental compensation to be developed by mining companies, in addition to capture the degree of territorial belonging of the population of the city. The proposal is to confirm the hypothesis that the inhabitants of the city, despite the high degree of economic dependence on mining, still do not know the legal aspects inherent to the activity and have a low degree of territorial belonging. For this, two surveys were carried out: one with 1000 and the other with 1024 inhabitants of the city to generate two indicators referring to knowledge about mining and territorial belonging. It has been proven that the population of Parauapebas has, for the most part, a low degree of knowledge about the legal aspects of receiving CFEM and environmental compensation, as well as a low degree of engagement of the population in activities related to the management and care of the municipality, such as such as public hearings and participation in elections. This shows a low degree of belonging to the city and these two problems reflect on the formation of social capital, since the panorama is of a population of a mining municipality that does not understand about mining and that manifests little in terms of civic participation in the management of the city. City.

In Brazil, the financial compensation for the exploration of mineral resources (CFEM) has provided a considerable increase in the collection of ore producing municipalities. Therefore, understanding the relationship between social efficiency and quality of life, combined with the legal duties of the Brazilian State, is essential to propose mechanisms capable of evaluating the conversion of this economic wealth into public services that promote the population's quality of life, which is a measure of social efficiency. This study aimed to analyze contextual factors and aspects that impact the social environment and that, in turn, change the level of people's satisfaction, being this a measure of quality of life. A confirmatory factor analysis was applied in a dataset with 1024 responses from residents of the municipality of Parauapebas. The results present sufficient evidence to accept that the measurement instrument well shaped by a bifactorial structure, given the set of responses and items evaluated, and demonstrate good evidence of internal consistency and reliability and, consequently, can be used to assess the measure of social efficiency and quality of life in terms of population satisfaction. In conclusion, the model indicates an inability of the public power to convert the high revenue into services that generate quality of life, showing that the municipality presents characteristics of the phenomenon called the curse of natural resources.