In order to understand the process of producing wealth through the transformation of the land, the aim is to take into account the most varied aspects that can shape the subject, especially its economic, social, cultural and political elements. Without neglecting the aforementioned aspects, the project also aims to understand the social representation of nature in its current process of commodification and the socio-environmental transformations it brings about, opening up space for questioning the role of the environment in the process of transforming land into wealth. In order to do this, we will use an analysis based on the assumptions of political sociology to understand the macro-historical processes of ongoing social transformations (REIS, 2015). The geographical focus of the research will be MATOPIBA, the acronym for four Brazilian states notorious for being the focus of agricultural expansion in the 21st century and which have the cerrado as their biome: Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia.
Within this approach, the first focus will be on the process of agricultural modernization that took place between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century in Brazilian history. The aim is to analyze the Land Law of 1850, when access to land became possible only through purchase, which was valued as private property and had a major influence on land concentration in Brazil. In the 20th century, the process of regulating forests in the Forest Code from 1934 to the most recent changes to the Code will be analyzed, as well as the complex duality between the market and nature.