On the margins of soy farms: traditional populations and selective environmental policies in the Brazilian Cerrado

Abstract

In the Cerrado, the expansion of soybean cultivation since the 1990s has coincided with the strengthening of environmental regulations. We analyze how the two main environmental policies – Protected Areas and the Forest Code – have played out at the ground level in western Bahia state. These policies in Cerrado have not been designed to curb the expansion of this agricultural frontier. These norms have, on the contrary, accommodated this expansion because the way environmental managers selectively choose environmental problems and publicize them through specific information systems depreciates traditional fire-dependent production systems. These ‘politics of selection’ are likely to increase competition for resources in the margins of soybean agriculture, which is where traditional populations have now become confined.

Keywords:

• deforestation
• environmental norms
• fire policies
• soybean
• political ecology
• Cerrado

Acknowledgements

We thank the communities that welcomed us and took part in the research, our academic research partners and institutions that have supported this work. One part of the Environmental Governance (ENGOV) project was conducted by the Centro de Desenvolvimento Substentável (CDS) of the National University of Brasilia (UnB), in collaboration with the Chico Mendes Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) and the Instituto Estadual das Florestas (IEF), with funding from the European Union (FP7-2010, Agreement no. SSH-CT-2010-266.710). The project “Visões contemporâneas do cerrado e intersecção de politicas sociais e ambientais” (RESBIO) was conducted by the Instituto de Estudos Socioambientais (IESA) of the Federal University of Goiás (UFG), by the CDS and by the Institute of Research for Development (IRD-France), in collaboration with ICMBio, with funding by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (Edital UNIVERSAL CNPq No. 14/2011). Finally, the research in Jalapão (Tocantins) was conducted by ICMBio, with funding from the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ). This research also received the support of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (INSHS) at the the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) through the ‘Support for International Mobility – 2014’ program.

Notes

¹Legal Amazonia covers nearby 4 million km², of which 19 percent of native forest has already been deforested. The Cerrado has half the size of Legal Amazonia (2 million km²) and, in 2012, 49 percent of its natural vegetation had been cleared (IBGE 2012).

²We define traditional populations (or traditional farmers) in a broad sense, independently from their political mobilization and their cultural affirmation: communities that are historical heirs of different forms of use, management, knowledge and symbolic representations of the Cerrado, characterized by their historical relationship with the territory they claim, and by low-input production systems. This expression clubs together different social groups, such as indigenous and quilombola (descendents of Maroon slaves) communities, farmers (in agricultural settlements or members of rural communities), artisans, fishermen, extractivists, etc.

³Fieldwork was undertaken in collaboration with Brazilian institutions (see Acknowledgements).

⁴The Cerrado biome spreads across the states of Goiás, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Maranhão, Piauí, Paraná and São Paulo, and the Federal District.

⁵The federal government is responsible for demarcating indigenous lands and is the formal owner of those lands. However, indigenous people have full rights to the natural resources on their lands and can use the land according to the Forest Code, as can any private landowner. Even so, indigenous lands in the Amazon are the least deforested areas in the region, particularly on the agricultural frontier (Nepstad et al. 2006).

⁶In the 1990s, irrigation in Western Bahia began without proper licensing from the state (Brannstrom 2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ludivine Eloy

Ludivine Eloy Costa Pereira is a graduate in Agronomy and holds a master's degree in Agronomy and Development from AgroparisTech (France) and a PhD in Geography from the University Sorbonne Nouvelle (France). She is currently a Research Scientist at the National Center for Scientific Research (Montpellier, France), and an Invited Researcher at the Center for Sustainable Development (University of Brasilia). Her current research focus is on the interactions between (agri)environmental policies, land use changes and fire management in the Brazilian Cerrado. Corresponding author: [email protected]

Catherine Aubertin

Catherine Aubertin is an environmental economist, working mainly on the political economy of biodiversity. She is a researcher at the IRD (Institut de recherche pour le développement, France) and a visiting researcher at the Instituto de Estudos Socioambientais (IESA), Goiás Federal University, Brazil. Her research activities are now focused on the market-based instruments used by environmental policies. She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Natures, Sciences, Sociétés. Email: [email protected]

Fabiano Toni

Fabiano Toni holds a BS in agronomy, an MS in science policy and a PhD in political science. Currently, he is a professor and graduate coordinator at the Center for Sustainable Development, University of Brasília, where he teaches environmental governance. His research interests include the decentralization of forest policies and the impacts of climate policies on land use, with a focus on the Brazilian Amazonia and Cerrado. Email: [email protected]

Silvia Laine Borges Lúcio

Sílvia Laine Borges Lúcio is a graduate in biology with an MS in sustainable development. Currently, she is a researcher in the project ‘Rede Clima’, University of Brasília, where she acts as collaborator researcher in the Center of Sustainable Development. Her research interests include environmental conflicts between different actors in protected areas. Email: [email protected]

Marion Bosgiraud

Marion Bosgiraud is an agronomic engineer specializing in international agricultural development (ISTOM, France). In 2013, she completed her master's research in Eastern Goiás State, Brazilian Cerrado. Email: [email protected]