Noventa por cento de ferro nas calçadas: mineração e (sub)desenvolvimentos em municípios minerados pela Vale S.A.

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relations between mining and socioeconomic development, or the lack of it, in municipalities mined by brazilian company Vale. I examine the environmental, social and economic impacts that mining causes in municipalities where Vale is present. We understand the dynamics of the economic mining activity as a social organization. I seek to realize a debate on the social and economic effects of mineral-exporting activity in the local population of mined areas. The chosen way to better understand the relations between mining and development was a comparative study of mined municipalities. I chose three municipalities, namely: Parauapebas (Brazil); Sudbury (Canada); Moatize (Mozambique). The Brazilian mining company Vale keep prospecting activities in these three municipalities. I want to understand how the changes in the world economic system, with the reorganization of Brazilian capitalism and its supposed repositioning, affected the situation of extractive regions and created new situations. I also try to analyze the type of impact that mining causes in mined municipalities in different contexts and what are the causes for the various combinations of these impacts. I seek to know whether there is a modus operandi of the company Vale. The central hypothesis of this research is that in single or defined by the pre-eminent market conditions, mining causes or promotes the typical socio-economic conditions of underdevelopment. The market hegemony in determining the mining model to be exercised generates social, economic and environmental problems. The local productive specialization in mining generated by the free market generates dependency - of the population, the rest of the productive structure of mined areas and the state apparatus - the currency of mining activity. This dependent reproduction limits and conditions the economic possibilities of the mined areas. The influence of labor unions, social movements, civil society organizations and the local population, as well as the surveillance and monitoring capacity of the state apparatus, and economic diversification, are the variables that can mitigate and reduce the breadth and depth of the impacts caused by mining activity. Another hypothesis is that Brazilian capitalism has expanded in the last fourteen years of a fragile and subordinate way. Although national capitals have entered traditionally rich countries, this expansion was made generally in the exploitation of natural resources sectors, subordinated and exclusionary form of the populations were found along the way, especially in poorer countries.