O milagre acabou: história da Cooperativa Regional Tritícola Serrana (COTRIJUI)
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| Main Author: | |
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| Publication Date: | 2025 |
| Format: | Doctoral thesis |
| Language: | por |
| Source: | Repositório Institucional da UPF |
| Download full: | https://repositorio.upf.br/handle/123456789/10161 |
Summary: | This dissertation examines the Serrana Regional Wheat Cooperative (Cotrijui), focusing on its expansion, crisis, and reorganization phases from the 1970s to the 1990s. The period began in the northwestern region of Rio Grande do Sul and continued throughout the southern region of the state, the Central-West region, and the North of Brazil. This led to an expansion of its operations that paralleled the expansion of national agricultural frontiers. The question is: how did Cotrijui, which expanded nationally between the 1970s and 1980s, retreat back to the regional level in the 1990s? The dissertation objectively analyzes Cotrijui's structure, projects, and results, using Cotrijornal, an information and communication outlet that circulated between July 1973 and August 1994, as its primary source. The dissertation justifies this by citing the relevance of cooperativism as a social movement that both produces and reproduces the contradictions of capitalism. It also aims to discuss the regional importance of South Brazilian cooperatives. It is framed within the fields of Social History and Environmental History, linking Cotrijui's trajectory to the process of agricultural modernization within the context of the Green Revolution. The methodology analyzes Cotrijui's discourse, interpreting its language, themes, history, and ideologies, to understand its positions on topics such as the agricultural frontier, regional economic development, sustainability, and the verticalization of agricultural activity. The findings suggest that Cotrijui was created and developed by leveraging the benefits of the Economic Miracle, prioritizing technologies that brought gains in scale to a small fraction of large producers and participants, thus enabling the capitalist transformation of agriculture, subordinated to government policies and financial capital, rather than serving as an alternative economic system. By problematizing the expansion of frontiers, the author concludes that Cotrijui, originally a solidarity-based organization, became an instrument for subjugating labor to capital by promoting farmers' engagement with a prescriptively entrepreneurial, modernizing, and developmentalist discourse, thus participating in ongoing socio-environmental changes. Cotrijui's retraction to the regional level in the 1990s, after its significant national expansion in the 1970s and 1980s, and the incorporation of agribusiness discourse, were discovered as the result of the adoption of a set of practices and discourses aligned with the development model of the time, which broke with the solidarity-based principles of cooperativism and accentuated the contradictions of the capitalist model of agricultural development. |