By Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira

I adapt James Scott’s framework for a comparative analysis of ongoing changes in land ownership in the Amazon and the Cerrado regions of Brazil. The Brazilian government recently initiated a program intended to regularize titles of 300.000 homesteaders in yet-unassigned public land in the Amazon region. This new effort in state-making over a largely illegible landscape intends to offset large-scale illegal land grabs and ongoing (though significantly curtailed) deforestation. In contrast, generally legal large-scale agribusiness investments are speeding up deforestation and concentration of land ownership in the Cerrado region by well established state mechanisms, encouraging thereby greater foreign and domestic investments. The difference in legibility between these two regions distinguishes the policies adopted by the Brazilian state towards each, leading to significantly different socio-ecological outcomes: the imposition of legibility may regulate land concentration and degradation, yet legible landscapes facilitate both concentration and degradation. The state-making framework developed captures the heterogeneity of processes easily confounded in references to a global land rush. The conclusions drawn from this comparative analysis highlight the importance of considering state-making processes in the current rush to comprehend land grabbing worldwide, especially where international investments have received greater prominence than domestic factors, such as in Sub-Saharan Africa.