Sustainable Development in Amazonia

Paradise in the Making

Kei Otsuki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136179624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This book argues against the assumption that sustainability and environmental conservation are naturally the common goal and norm for everyone in Amazonia. This is the first book focusing on agency, reflexivity and social development to address sustainable development in the region. It discusses the importance of looking into societal dynamics in order to deal with deforestation and sustainable development policies through the ethnography of an Amazonian settlement named New Paradise.

This book demystifies utopian and overtly conservationist views that depict the Amazon rainforest as a troubled paradise. Engaging with social theory of practice with particular focus on emergentist perspectives and Foucault's analysis of 'heterotopia', the author shows that Amazonia is a set of settlement heterotopias in which various local and external initiatives interact to make up real, lived-in places. The settlers' placemaking continually rearranges power and material relations while the process usually emphasises utopian developmentalist and conservationist policy intervention. This book explores in detail how, as power relations are arranged and governance reshaped, sustainable development and construction of a green society also need to become a goal for the settlers themselves.

The book's insights on the relationship between the sustainable development frameworks used in environmental policy, and ongoing societal development on the ground inform debate both within Amazonia, and in comparable communities worldwide. It also offers institutional pathways to realise new, more engaging, policy intervention for development professionals and policy makers.

1 Introduction

In July 1999 I first stepped into Brazilian Amazonia. I was a masters student in Japan and had been given an opportunity to travel to the state of Para in Eastern Amazonia (Amazônia Oriental) as an assistant for a small research project examining sustainable tropical agricultural practices conducted by Japanese immigrant farmers. The research project sought to analyse an agroforestry system that the Japanese had developed, which was considered an example of sustainable agricultural practices in the humid tropics (Fearnside 1995, Smith et al. 1998, Yamada 1999).¹ The local staff members of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency based in Belém, Pará's capital city, introduced several Japanese farmers to our research team as those who practiced agroforestry. We visited their farms (mostly headed by the first generation immigrants) near Belém in the northeast of Pará, which were mainly plantations of a variety of fruit and palm trees.

The Japanese farmers told their histories of immigration, boom-and-bust economic cycles of black pepper monoculture, and eventual organisation of farmers' cooperatives and engagement with tree crop plantations. I had imagined that these farmers would be proud of their sustainable agricultural practice. However, they invariably said that they had never thought that they were conducting "sustainable" agriculture. Facing the failures of pepper monoculture, they simply kept doing what they could do and knew how to do in order to survive in the rainforest. The lauded agroforestry was an outcome of their agricultural practices which had developed over decades through the experience. I also learned that I could not generalise that Japanese farmers were all equally "sustainable" because some farmers specialised in extensive cattle ranching, oil palm monoculture, and distribution or logging businesses.

After the research project, I contacted a local NGO - Action for Sustainable Development in Amazonia (ASDA), affiliated with the Federal University of Pará in Belém.² ASDA was known for its innovative sustainable development projects in Pará, which aimed to improve the poor Amazonians' life conditions by promoting community-based agroforestry and agro-industry projects. I wanted to know more about Brazilian farming practices, as many of the Japanese farmers had told me that local Brazilians (whom they called caboclos in a slightly patronising manner) were "destructive", "sloppy" and "not well organised".³ I was curious about what the Brazilians were actually doing, what sustainable development meant to them, and how the NGO projects sought to change their destructive behaviour. At the same time, although it was an interesting experience, I did not want to exclusively focus on the Japanese farmers for further research since they were a minority group in Amazonia, and I did not know anything about the ordinary Brazilian farmers who were said to be the ones destroying the rainforest in the first place. I began to wonder whether the Brazilians were really destructive and disorganised (thus implicitly unsustainable) or whether they also had stories similar to those of the Japanese farmers, whose practices were only labelled as "sustainable" by outsiders later on.

ASDA was one of the environmental NGOs which appeared on the occasion of the Rio Summit in 1992 to promote sustainable development projects in both rural and urban communities throughout Amazonia. The ASDA's coordinators were very receptive, and let me accompany the técnicos (agricultural extensionists), mostly on loan from the state agencies, who occasionally visited communities where the projects were implemented. We started by visiting several villages as well as islands in the northeastern part of Pará. I did not at the time understand Portuguese very well and therefore could not make good sense of what the villagers or técnicos were telling me. However, by walking around and observing houses, farms and the surrounding forest, I could at least tell that there was significant variation in the organisation of the houses ( which often attached kitchens and wells in home gardens in which fruit trees were grown), farms, manioc processing units (casas de farinha), roads, paths and streams (igarapés for taking a bath, washing cloths) from one village to another. Access to basic infrastructure like electricity, portable water and principal paved roads affected this difference in organisation. The main things shared by each village, whether in floodplain (várzea) or in dry land (terra firme), were the church (Catholic or Protestant) and a football field situated more or less at the centre. I also noticed that the relationship between the técnicos and the villagers varied. In one village, everyone knew the técnico who showed me around, whilst in another few people talked to him.⁴ Although I did not comprehend their conversations very well, it was easy to recognise the difference between the villagers who were friends with the técnicos and those who were indifferent.

In short, I was impressed by the diversity that existed between the rural communities in Para. The impression might have had something to do with my preconception about how poor communities should have looked. To me, the villagers looked quite poor, and I expected that they would be equally united to improve their life standards, asking for support from the técnicos from external agencies like the NGO) or foreigners from O Primeiro Mi onto (the First World) like me. Instead, I saw different groups of individuals who spontaneously and flexibly formed their relationships with the técnicos and also with the environment. In addition, their behaviour appeared to be quite pragmatic since they seemed to take what opportunities they could to eke out a living and, therefore, although they lived in the forest, it would be too simple to call them "forest dwellers".

The técnicos later explained to me that these poor caboclos needed capacity building (capacitaçãao) to organise themselves to improve their life conditions in a sustainable manner. Then I realised that my preconception had been shaped by a general belief, shared by the técnicos that community organisation was necessary for sustainable development. Indeed, the burgeoning literature at that time asserted that materialisation of sustainable development was supposedly underpinned by "local-level solutions derived from community initiatives" leading to "community-based natural resource management" (Leach, Mearns and Scoones 1999: 225, see also Western and Wright 1994).

The experience in the northeast of Para was followed by a series of trips to the southeast of Pará whose landscape looked, to me, utterly devastated. Along the state highway PA-150 from Belém to the southeastern centre of Marabá, for about five hundred kilometres, I could not see any forest left. It was hard to imagine that the southeast of Pará had been known for its dense brazil nut forest until the 1980s (Emmi 1999, Kitamura 1994, Homma 2000). On the roadsides, the black plastic sheet-covered shacks of landless farmers' (known as sem terras) formed precarious settlements, and our car passed monuments of the sem terras massacred by the state military police in 1996. The well-known tale of large landowners destroying forests and oppressing poor landless farmers in Amazonia vividly unfolded before my eyes.

When our car entered the devastated area in my first trip in summer 1999, the técnico told me that the area was called Cemitério das Castanheiras (Cemetery of Brazil Nuts). The landscape was filled with innumerable dead trees bleached from burning. Then a small village appeared below the hill. As we drove into the village, the técnico exclaimed in clumsy English: "Welcome to New Paradise!" Because the village was called Novo Paraíso, literally, New Paradise.

Upon arrival, I was introduced to the villagers who called themselves "small producers (pequenos produtores)". These small producers had plots outside the village and thus they were the ones who were often depicted in the literature as smallholders or small farmers of Amazonian settlements (e.g. Ozório de Almeida and Campari 1995, Alston, Libecap and Mueller 1999). This meant that the devastated area I had seen from the car was not only owned by the large landowners but also by the small ones. It was August, which was the end of the dry season (or summer) in Amazonia, and these small farmers were conducting the practice of queima, the burning. The Paradise was in the middle of hellish smoke and dust, and I was becoming increasingly confused. Why is this place called Paradise? Why do people burn the forest and are they happy about it? How come small farmers conduct activities that create the same landscape as the large farmers? Is this devastation really because these Brazilians are lazy and ignorant and do not appreciate the forests' value or understand agricultural cultivation?

These questions eventually led me to start living and conducting fieldwork in Novo Paraíso while working for ASDA. The experience seriously made me question my original image of sustainable development and community in Amazonia. In principle, I realised that the so-called poor people (ie. those described as caboclos or small farmers in Amazonia) were more individualistic than I had imagined, but I was not sure if they were "disorganised". Like the Japanese farmers, the Brazilian farmers and the técnicos who closely interact with them, were doing what they had to do or what they knew how to do to survive and earn a livelihood in the rainforest. Each individual seemed to maintain his or her own way of understanding and carrying out activity in relation to the others and the environment. It was often outsiders who described their activity as sustainable (and organised) or unsustainable (and disorganised) in reference to the condition of the forest.

As I started to understand Portuguese, I also learned that different meanings were attached to the word comunidade (community) in different contexts. Sometimes, a comunidade simply indicated the neighbourhood in which the people in question (i.e. community members) inhabited. But the use of comunidade also appeared to be more symbolic, especially when the term was applied to a locality by outsiders (for its sustainability and development). When it was used by outsiders, the meaning of comunidade was not always shared by community members in the same way. In other words, while the word comunidade indicated the existence of a collective identity, the process of identification with the collectivity could vary among the individual members, and this variation could have been responsible for influencing the diversity of village organisations and shaping of landscapes.

Likewise, I noted that in Brazil, "to sustain (siistentar) was usually used in the context of making a living or sustaining a household. This could indicate that ordinary people might have ideas about sustainable development that differ from those of the tís and experts. Therefore, the essential role that the tís asserted community organisations play in the promotion of sustainable development could have been understood differently by the communities themselves and instead result more simply from community members trying to live their lives in the particular social and ecological context of the Amazonia. The técnicos often talked about community organisation as a synonym for a farmer's association or a cooperative that should be formally institutionalised. Formal organisations are necessary for técnicos to establish contact with their beneficiaries and implement planned sustainable development projects. Thus, they often said that the poor were "disorganised" when they did not have a formal organisation or when the organisation was weak. However, as the variation in meanings of comunidade and sustainable development suggests, people can always create different informal groups and forms of identification with the collectivity to improve the conditions of their lives within their social world in a sustainable manner. Therefore, the causal relation between disorganisation and deforestation or organisation and sustainable development might not be as self-evident as the técnicos implied.

I then began to imagine the people in Amazonia as independent persons and a community as something that could be identified differently by each person. There was obviously an elusive process by which official policy practices of Sustainable Development and everyday practices of sustainable development interacted and affected the landscape. I wondered if the devastation of the rainforest could be viewed as an autonomous expression emerging from individuals shaping their lifeworlds. Isn't there a possibility that an individual can define and pursue his or her own project of sustainable development, which looks totally unsustainable in the eyes of outsiders who strive to promote Sustainable Development? Doesn't this possibility explain why the small farmers name their village New Paradise, when it is described as a cemetery of dead trees by the técnicos and scholars (e.g. Homma 2004)? In turn, isn't this possibility suggesting that we need to scrutinise individual projects of sustainable development more closely in order to identify ways to negotiate ideas and practices of Sustainable Development? If we really want to promote Sustainable Development in order to preserve the Amazonian rainforest and alleviate poverty, don't we need to understand individual conduct on the ground in ethnographic detail?

Green society, human reflexivity and settlement heterotopias

This book is about narrowing the apparent gap between the officially promoted Sustainable Development and the ongoing human action that shapes vernacular practices of sustainable development in ecologically risk-prone areas such as Amazonia (Frenchione 1999). First, I will examine policy and scholarly discourses of Sustainable Development⁵, which have worked to link (often implicitly) environmental problems such as deforestation to social problems such as disorganisation, leading to generate the general belief shared by the técnicos and indeed myself that community organisation is necessary for sustainable development. More specifically, I will discuss intellectual construction of sustainability and development in detail and argue that we now need to delve deeper into an analysis of the corporeal nature of human action, as corporeality enables a person to gradually shape a social space of citizenship through placemaking and demarcate a society underpinned by personal interactions and arrangement of physical materials (Lefebvre 1991). Corporeal citizens are not usual Cartesian individuals who first think carefully and then act rationally towards sustainability. They often act pragmatically under given circumstances and then reflect on the action, make deliberations, and change course from the previous action, potentially leading to new collective action and opening of new spaces for change (Joas 1996). We, the scholars and experts, need to know how we can participate in these corporeal citizens' deliberations over issues of sustainability, find linkages between their community and a wider societal context, and facilitate them to become environmental citizens who associate sustainability as a necessary virtue (Connelly 2006).

I chose Novo Paraíso, the village in the cemetery of burned brazil nut trees, as a base from which to consider possible ways In which the apparently destructive settlers might start to become environmental citizens and begin to engage with shaping a green society in Amazonia. Since the first visit in the summer 1999, the New Paradise had kept on stirring my imagination and curiosity. At the Rio Summit in 1992, a discourse of Amazonia without myths emphasised the importa...