Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Artigo Acesso aberto Produção Nacional

BIBTEX RIS

Social Impacts with the end of the Manual Sugarcane Harvest: A Case Study in Brazil

2017; MedCrave Group; Volume: 1; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15406/sij.2017.01.00020

2576-4470

Jussara dos Santos Rosendo,

Rural Development and Agriculture

Brazil is the largest producer of sugarcane in the world, the expansion of the sugarenergy sector has been redesigning the agrarian space in the regions of its cultivation, changing the relations of production, replacing crops, concentrating lands and modifying labor relations.The present article presents the results of the research carried out in the Ituiutaba Microregion in the western of Minas Gerais state, Brazil, which represents one of the most productive areas of the State where the replacement of manual harvest by the harvest cane green with mechanization generated social impacts at workers.In this way, the main objective of the research was to understand the social impacts, more specifically the unemployment and (re) insertion in the labour Market, of the workers with the end of manual sugarcane harvest in the Microregion of Ituiutaba.The methodology included the qualitative approach, through semi-structured interviews with the president of the union of workers and representatives of the sugarcane agribusiness and with eighty former workers of the manual harvest in the region.The results showed that the great majority of the workers in manual cane harvest are migrants from the Northeastern states of Piauí and Alagoas.The agribusiness in the region prefer these workers because they lack local labor and because they have more physical resistance and they are more "submissive" to the imposed working conditions.The bankruptcy of sugarcane agribusiness in the Microrregion, the substituition of the manual sugarcane harvest by the mechanization contributed to the closing of hundreds of jobs, causing unemployment and worsening the living conditions of these workers.