Ayres de Souza Irrigated Perimeter

This book takes a look at the establishment of the Ayres de Souza Irrigated Perimeter - PIAS, located in the district of Jaibaras, in the municipality of Sobral, Ceará, and the transformations that have taken place in this fragment of territory, which since the 1970s has been expropriated by the state via DNOCS and settled with farming families, to become irrigators or settlers, instilled with new mentalities of developing economic practices, aiming to provide the socio-economic conditions for the expansion of capitalism in the countryside, thus altering the socio-territorial identity of the subjects involved. After the 1990s, with the change in the state’s intervention in its new form of action, this Perimeter went through a process of ＂abandonment＂ because it didn’t correspond to the logic of export-oriented production. Thus, we are talking about the trajectories of the irrigators impacted by the public policies, the former residents who were dispossessed and began to live in the suburbs of neighbouring towns, being doubly marginalized. We also highlight the process of reclaiming the Perimeter, since in 2015 DNOCS mapped the area and issued values for charging for the plots, but these are considered high.