The land-agri-urban nexus in Matopiba, Brazil

Matopiba is an acronym for Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia, the four Cerrado states that compose the region, which extends the size of Chile or France.

Matopiba is Brazil’s latest agricultural frontier, which has been the result of a political process encouraged and stimulated by federal government policies and programmes. And the potential for high returns on investment has transformed the land into a global financial asset. As a consequence, the Cerrado biome has overtaken the Amazon in terms of deforested area and land grabbing has provoked enormous socio-territorial conflicts and deepened social inequalities.

Socio-spatial Transformation

Situated within global processes of land assetisation, the Brazilian case highlights the contradictions between financial accumulation, territorial dispossession, environmental degradation, and agrarian extractivism, revealing how capital flows and corporate strategies reshape socio-spatial relations across the agricultural frontier.

We explore the Matopiba territory analysing the key actors, drivers, and mechanisms behind wealth creation in the agribusiness sector. We apply a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative analysis of agribusiness firms listed on B3 (the Brazilian Stock Exchange) with qualitative field research in western Bahia.