The Promised Land in Piauí: trajectories of peasant partners in the Biodiesel Program

More than the ground we step on, the earth is a mother, it is a provider, it is life. The issue of access to land has always been a key factor in the formation of Brazilian society. After all, who has the right to this vast land where, if planted, everything is possible? The landowners, who keep countless tracts of unproductive land as future investments? Private capital, which with State incentives uses arable land for the production of inputs that are often foreign to the local culture? To the State, which on countless occasions has turned its back on the needs of the peasant population?

These issues are the backdrop for the first work by sociologist Maria Elza Soares da Silva released by Editora SertãoCult, which sensitively portrays the arduous struggle for survival of peasants in the interior of Piauí. Convinced that they were taking a safe step towards the long-awaited acquisition of land for the reproduction of their way of life, they found themselves thrown into an unknown reality, uprooted from their traditional agricultural customs and practices in order to adapt to the logic of production. of agribusiness. But this process was not without resistance.

For a harmonious coexistence, concessions were made both by the partner peasants and by the company that hired them to produce castor beans for the production of biodiesel. Both sides had to gain: the company, the maintenance of a lucrative contract with the federal government. The peasants, the promise that such land would be theirs after ten years of work. But the clash between traditional practices, capitalist dynamics and political interests proved that promises are not always kept. The dream of the promised land in the interior of Piauí continues to cherish the days of those workers, whose life stories are recorded in an engaging way by the author, who in a breathtaking ethnographic experience inserts the reader into the routine of conquests and difficulties of the partner peasants of Brasil Ecodiesel - pioneering plant in the implementation of the social dimension of the National Program for the Use of Biodiesel Production - PNPB.