Agro-environmental law in dispute: the presence of foreign capital and the (in)effectiveness of socio-environmental rights in brazilian rural areas

Abstract

The presence of the foreign capital in national lands and the submission of internal demands facing the international capital interests are not new aspects in the brazilian social-legal scenario. The advance of capitalist development model implemented in Brazil, by encouraging monoculture production and perpetuate the agro-export structure of commodities, strictly linked important environmental issues to the achievement of national and international market interests, in violation of numerous importants fundamental rights. Aware that the legal struggle alone is not able to modify the structural relationships of inequality established in more complex and deeper levels of social life and the changing paradigms of Agro-Environmental Law - historically concerned to carry out the categories productivity and entrepreneurship as central elements of rural development - is also essential for the reproduction of the capitalist model of production, it is understood that the Law has social and environmental responsibilities that must be observed and realized. Given the above, through the inductive, deductive, dialectic and interdisciplinary method, this study proposes to present the social, environmental, legal and (un)sustainable impacts present in the rural areas of Brasil opposite the foreign capital presence and also demonstrate the potential that the Agro-Environmental Law has as an important instrument of social transformations.