Sauer, S. (2024).
Environmental issues, especially climate change, have become more urgent, intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic and rising hunger and inequality. Yet demand for agricultural and mineral commodities continues to drive frontier expansion, including monocultures, livestock, and extraction for export. This text engages debates in Political Economy and Political Ecology, asking whether this urgency has renewed attention to land and agrarian questions. It contributes to Critical Agrarian Studies by proposing the concept of an eco-agrarian issue and critically analyzing agrarian extractivism in Brazil’s agricultural frontier.
In: Revista NERA (UNESP), v. 27, n. 02, p. 1-30, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47946/rnera.v27i2.10185
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De O. Evangelista, M. y Sauer, S. (2025).
This research examines the contradictions and socio-environmental impacts of Matopiba, a region of 337 municipalities in the Cerrado across Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia, defined in 2015 as the “new and last” agricultural frontier. Linking its creation to Brazil’s land history, it analyzes how wealth appropriation, framed as development, sustains and expands territorial contradictions. While recent growth has driven record agricultural and mineral exports, it also intensifies deforestation and deepens inequalities and land conflicts, exposing the contradictions of agro-export expansion on the Brazilian frontier.
In: Retratos de Assentamentos. vol. 28, n. 02, 2025, 219-237. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25059/2527-2594/retratosdeassentamentos/2025.v28i2.640
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De O. Evangelista, M. y Sauer, S. (2025).
The idea that food systems depend mainly on production volume overlooks the roles of sustainability, culture, and food quality in their reproduction. In Campos Lindos, a key case in the Matopiba agricultural frontier, agribusiness-driven growth produces high output yet coexists with precarious social conditions and food insecurity, revealing these contradictions. Based on interviews with nine rural producers, this study examines their perceptions, the food context they operate in, and how agribusiness dynamics drive frontier expansion while deepening inequality and food insecurity.
In: Geopauta, Vol. 9, 2025, e18116. ISSN: 2594-5033 - http://periodicos2.uesb.br/index.php/geo; https://doi.org/10.22481/rg.v9.18116.pt.
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Leite, A. Z., Sátiro, G. S. y Sauer, S. (2024).
The political framing of Matopiba as an empty, underused frontier masks social and economic problems, obscuring that expansion drives deforestation and relies on illegal land appropriation. This chapter examines processes of accumulation and dispossession and their socio-environmental impacts in the Brazilian Cerrado, focusing on conflicts over land, water, slave labor, and violence, and relating these to land distribution, farm numbers, and soybean production.The conversion of Matopiba and the Cerrado into “sacrifice zones” highlights the urgent need to rethink development and strengthen policies protecting traditional populations and their territorial rights.
In: Marta Inez Medeiros Marques; Vicente E. Lemos Alves. (Org.). Fronteira do MATOPIBA: As novas faces da expansão do capital e seus conflitos. São Paulo: Ed FFLCH, USP, 2024, p. 473-494.
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Reis, N. y Vargas Magaña, G. (2025).
Mexico’s state-owned Banco del Bienestar is central to the government’s project of promoting an “alternative to neoliberalism” and a “moral economy.” This chapter argues that, despite supporting the poor through social benefits and microcredit—especially during the Covid-19 crisis—the bank primarily advances a financial inclusion agenda shaped by alliances among global financial institutions, Mexican elites, the military, and parts of the left. This agenda reinforces a “moral economy” that deepens the poor’s dependence on the state and integrates them into exploitative relations with financial and corporate actors.
In: Review of Political Economy, 37(3), 937–964. https://doi.org/10.1080/09538259.2024.2319198
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Mejía-Forero, K., Coma, M. C., Bayón-Jimenez, M., y Armas-Díaz, A. (2025).
The paper examines processes of accumulation, neoliberalization, and the exploitation of human and non-human nature, as well as responses to these dynamics in Latin America and Southern Europe. Based on these territorial contexts, it proposes a theoretical framework from political ecology and critical geography: territorial accumulation. This approach is presented as a tool for understanding inequalities in a context of multiple crises and as having emancipatory potential for dispossessed, disadvantaged, and marginalized groups.
In: Scripta Nova: revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias sociales, 29(2), 15-38.
Link to PublicationLeite, A. Z., Sátiro, G. S. y Sauer, S. (2024).
The political framing of MATOPIBA as an uninhabited and underused frontier hides key social and economic issues, including that expansion drives deforestation and that monoculture relies on land grabbing and illegal appropriation of public lands. The text examines historical processes of accumulation and dispossession and their socio-environmental impacts, focusing on conflicts over land, water, slave labor, and violence in Brazil’s Cerrado, especially MATOPIBA. Based on literature and data analysis, it relates land distribution and conflicts to the expansion of soy production. As the region becomes a “sacrifice zone,” it highlights the need to rethink development models and implement policies to protect traditional populations and prevent land and resource appropriation.
In: MARQUES, Marta Inez Medeiros; ALVES, Vicente Eudes Lemos (eds.). The Matopiba Frontier: New Faces of Capital Expansion and Its Conflicts. São Paulo: FFLCH, 2024. p. 425–453. ISBN: 978-85-7506-512-9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11606/9788575065129
Link to PublicationThis project analyzes the spatialization of the global tourism production network in northern Quintana Roo. The central argument is that this spatialization occurs through a process of peripheral tourist urbanization, which unfolds across three dimensions: the strategic territorialization of tourist capital, the consolidation of a labor regime organizing social reproduction on an urban-regional scale, and the production of an assetized and fragmented urban space. Employing a mixed-methods approach (combining cartographic and statistical analysis with ethnographic fieldwork and interviews) the research is centered on the primary urban corridor of northern Quintana Roo, encompassing Cancún, Playa del Carmen, and Tulum.
This study examines the energy transition in the Antofagasta Region as a socio-spatial and political process that goes beyond a purely technological shift aimed at decarbonization. In a territory historically configured as an extractive enclave, the transition materializes through an infrastructural deployment that reorganizes space and modes of territorial intervention. The study explores how this process is territorialized through energy and supporting infrastructures operating across three interrelated dimensions: the ground, through large-scale solar and wind complexes and transmission corridors; the maritory, via the expansion of desalination, pipelines, and port terminals; and the sky, where tensions emerge around regimes of visibility, scientific protection, and control of atmospheric space.
The research analyzes how these configurations produce spatial patterns such as enclaves, corridors, and nodes, and how they are articulated through governance arrangements involving the state, corporations, and financial actors, thereby defining criteria of territorial prioritization and margins of decision-making. Methodologically, it combines critical cartography, documentary analysis, structured interviews, and qualitative fieldwork.
This project looks at two different forms of producing space and accumulating/distributing wealth in the biocultural region known as the P’urhépecha Plateau in Central Mexico. On the one side, it considers the avocadoindustry as a form of capitalist agriculture enabled by a series of international and local agreements and reproduced through legal and illegal practices where the appropriation and accumulation of land and embodied labor are a prerequisite for the extraction and accumulation of wealth. On the other side, the project looks at community processes of resistance to the agro-industry that pose the question of how to organize labor and redistribute wealth in order to kickstart processes of socio-ecological regeneration.
Klussmeyer, Camille (October 2026)
Regions in the Brazilian Cerrado are strongly impacted by expanding raw material production. The EU’s Deforestation-free Regulation (EUDR) addresses imported deforestation, but a major gap remains: by following the FAO forest definition, it excludes about 74% of the Cerrado, leaving this biodiverse savanna largely unprotected. This thesis investigates whether the EUDR could trigger spill-over effects, shifting soybean production from the Amazon to Matopiba, and examines potential impacts on land use, Indigenous communities, and ecosystems. Drawing on extractivism and green neo-colonialism, and based on expert interviews and document analysis, it assesses risks of land conflicts and exclusion for Indigenous peoples and smallholders. The study aims to inform more inclusive environmental policies that also protect non-forest ecosystems.
Araújo, Carlos Vinícius Gomes (November 2024)
Agricultural production increasingly serves financial markets, especially through commodity futures, shaping the Matopiba frontier. This region in the Cerrado and Legal Amazon (Tocantins, Maranhão, Bahia, and Piauí) reflects agrarian extractivism, land concentration, and deep inequality. The study analyzes how wealth is generated through land appropriation and extractivist activities, based on observation and stakeholder interactions. It shows that rural areas are embedded in neoliberal financial logics, where actors such as investment funds and real estate capital intensify land-use expansion linked to soy, corn, and cotton production. It concludes that wealth accumulation is decoupled from social well-being, with inequality driven by concentrated land ownership and the financialization of agriculture.
De Oliveira Evangelista, Milena (August 2025)
This dissertation analyzes contradictions in MATOPIBA between agribusiness-driven development and persistent inequalities in Brazil’s last agricultural frontier. It examines how land financialization and agribusiness expansion affect local populations, with emphasis on hunger and food insecurity, using interviews, document analysis, and food security theory. Focusing on Campos Lindos, a major soybean producer with very low social well-being, it highlights the gap between high production and poor living conditions. It traces MATOPIBA’s formation from the 1960s and the Green Revolution to its formalization in 2015, and uses concepts such as territory, frontier, extractivism, and land grabbing to show how accumulation drives environmental degradation and social exclusion. The study concludes that MATOPIBA was not designed to address food insecurity and has proven unsustainable for both ecosystems and local populations.