Da vulnerabilidade à dominação: modernização, mudança climática, migração, precarização do trabalho e desagregação familiar da população rural do Vale do Jequitinhonha, Brasil

Abstract

The intial objective of this research was to understand the socioeconomic consequences of the modernization process of sugarcane harvesting on the rural population of the Jequitinhonha Valley in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. This population is formed by Brazilian popular classes that have gone through a historical process of expropriation and territorial exploitation, largely carried out by the State. The families that make them up have developed social reproduction strategies based on temporary or permanent migration to work in the more developed regions of the country. At the time of the research, the temporary migrant rural workers had in the manual harvest of sugarcane their source of paid income and felt threatened by the inexorable process of mechanization and the consequent end of migration to work in the sugarcane mills in the state of São Paulo. The research on the impact of this process on the employment of rural workers brought to light another important factor that conditioned local migration, namely the climate change, by the increasing drought and water shortage, perceived by farmers in the alteration of the rainy cycle, «the time of the waters», and in the increase of temperature. Modernization and climate change have thus contributed to farmers’ greater exposure to contemporary changes in the labor market. Added to these two major issues is the breakdown of the peasants’ families and the precarization of labor in a process of increasing domination of already vulnerable individuals. The hypothesis of adaptation of workers to this new reality, with the diversification of migratory flows, which replaces the hypothesis of overwhelming unemployment, led us to construct the concept of an «adaptive migration» in the face of decrease and precarization of employment.