Institute of Development Studies (IDS)
Bio
Author Biography
Lídia Cabral is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK. She is a social scientist working across disciplines. Her work centres on the politics of food, South–South relations, and the power of discourse in driving policy and constructing identities. Her latest research focuses on the histories of the Green Revolution in Brazil, India, and China, exploring how narratives about the past shape the international circulation of knowledge and contemporary technology transactions in the global South. She is also interested in researching equity, justice, and territoriality in food systems.
University of Brasília
Bio
Author Biography
Sérgio Sauer has a PhD in Sociology and is Professor at the University of Brasília, Brazil. He holds a Brazilian CNPq scholarship and is the coordinator of the Observatory for Socio-environmental Conflicts in Matopiba, Brazil. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Peasant Studies and a fellow of the human rights non-governmental organisation Terra de Direitos, Brazil. His main research themes are agrarian extractivism, agricultural frontiers, land (land grabbing), and environment issues (green grabbing), rural public policies and development, agrarian social movements, and agribusiness.
Institute of Development Studies (IDS)
Bio
Author Biography
Alex Shankland is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), where he convenes the Brazil International Development Research and Mutual Learning Hub. He has worked for more than two decades on health systems, indigenous and minority health, civil society, accountability, political representation, and local governance, particularly in Brazil and Mozambique. Alex has also worked extensively on the roles of Brazil and other rising powers in reshaping international development cooperation. Before joining IDS, Alex worked as a journalist, non-governmental organisation project and programme manager, independent researcher, and social development consultant, mainly in South America and southern Africa.
Volume 54
Number 1
Published: February 2, 2023
As global agri-food systems come under increasing stress, debates on their future have become highly polarised, exposing fundamental differences in understandings and priorities: industrial production versus traditional rights; short-term yields versus longer-term sustainability; cheap versus healthy food. Brazil is at the core of these debates, with the Cerrado being centre stage since the soybean-powered Green Revolution. Accompanied by deforestation, soil degradation, and depletion of water resources, Brazil’s agricultural production frontier has now moved northwards into the Matopiba region. This issue of the IDS Bulletin explores the ongoing territorial transformation, considering the violent logics of extraction in frontier zones, the grabbing of nature, and the dynamics of resistance in local and international spheres. Exposing both the material and discursive appropriation experienced by the Cerrado, this issue profiles it as a key site of multi-scalar injustices against people and nature that need to be addressed by efforts to secure more just and sustainable agri-food systems.
Read the Portuguese version of this introduction.
Para ler a introdução em português, ver ‘Introdução: Lutando pelo Cerrado – um olhar territorial sobre uma fronteira disputada’.
