Geografia e ecologia política da mineração em Niquelândia (GO)

Abstract

Mining has become an economic, political, social and environmental problem in Brazil over the last few decades. In this sense, based on the connections between Geography and Political Ecology, the central focus of this research is to interpret the municipality of Niquelândia as a historically mined territory, producing situations of injustice and environmental suffering, as well as sacrifice zones. The collection of data and information relied on bibliographic studies on the subject in question and on sources such as the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), National Mining Agency (ANM), Mauro Borges Institute of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (IMB), Mapbiomas Project, National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) and the National Institute for Spatial Research (INPE). To download the data, the geoprocessing software QGIS was used, which is a free application software in Georeferenced Information Systems (GIS) that allows working with data, from visualization to the generation of georeferenced materials for the elaboration of the maps that make up this text. The Brazilian mining model is predatory and dependent on corporate control of territories, intensive use of water, energy and precarious work, and the maintenance of local populations in poverty and low income. This results in a territorial situation of injustice and environmental suffering, concepts that are worked on within Political Ecology, which highlights the various implications that the large economic sectors of the capitalist system cause, both in the nature and in society, especially in mined territories that cause socio-environmental impacts. Another problem identified in the research refers to the economic effects of large-scale mining in mined municipalities, producing situations of mineral dependence, as was seen in the municipality of Niquelândia. In historically mined municipalities, mineral dependence becomes an economic, political, social and cultural condition that reveals the contradictions of large-scale mining, since it implies the economic development of these territories, in addition to the fact that the resources extracted from nature are exhaustible and may end, generating exhaustion of these resources and territorial abandonment.