A logística intermodal gaúcha : as racionalidades territoriais na região de Cachoeira do Sul e Rio Pardo - RS.

Abstract

This research looked at the technical, political and economic process that led to the abandonment of physical railroad and port structures, built by public and private initiatives in the municipalities of Cachoeira do Sul and Rio Pardo, including specific railroad-port connection structures by municipal administrations, which were a huge economic and development potential for these territories, but over the course of a few decades were abandoned and the targets of mere speculation for new projects that never came to light. The aim was to understand which agents were involved in this process, as well as to find answers about the situation of the structures in the local contexts, and what kind of management or ownership they are under. The guiding object was to understand the process in order to draw up a broad analysis of what is happening today, as well as to list existing state and private projects to integrate modal structures, costs and comparisons with the road modal. To this end, the Historical Dialectical Materialist methodology and the work of the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos were used to outline the historical process from the global and national scales to finally reach the territorial scale, taking into account the rationalities present in the various managements of the rail and port modes, and in the massive use of the road mode. In the course of the bibliographical research, the type of cargo investigated was delimited in terms of the use of ports and railroads, which, within technical limitations, are better suited to transporting the most diverse types of bulk cargo, especially agricultural and agroforestry products, along the stretch investigated. From the interviews conducted with various representatives of public institutions, it was possible to identify a recognition of the need to debate and recover the use of abandoned road structures, as well as an individualized blaming of entrepreneurs and economic niches that monopolize the public machine for not carrying out existing projects for this recovery. On the other hand, many of the representatives of regionally important private institutions attribute the reason for the structural abandonment surveyed to political disinterest. From these it was possible to infer the existence of a dual responsibility in both spheres; however, the political interference in the state of an agro exporting class, inherited from the national historical process, which has influenced and sustained the political power of various subjects since Brazil's empire, was absolutely relevant to the comings and goings of the management of the rail modal between being under state tutelage and being indiscriminately handed over to the private sector. Always under the justification of the state's inability to generate foreign exchange and make such modal structures efficient, however, countless contradictions were highlighted in this process during the course of the research, making it clear that there is not only abandonment, but also exclusivity of use.