https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7324-4549
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The recent upsurge of deforestation inside conservation areas requires empirical investigation of the causes and consequences of this alarming process. Local relations between the agents of cattle capitalism, neodevelopmentalism and contemporary deforestation, from politicians and ranchers to the traditional extractive populations of multiple-use conservation areas, are assessed. Whether, when, and how state, market, and cultural institutions support the hegemony of cattle capitalism – and subvert the logic of traditional lived environments – are analyzed. Theoretically, the article shows how moral economic transformations, from rubber tapping to cowboy lifestyles, alongside neodevelopmentalist policies, enable regionally dominant political economies to expand through deforestation.
Notes on contributor
Markus Kröger is an Academy Research Fellow and Associate Professor in Development Studies, Faculty of Social Science, and Member of the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, University of Helsinki. His research has focused on the political economy of development and natural resource extraction, especially in Latin America, India, and the Arctic. He is the author of Contentious agency and natural resource politics, and a host of articles on world-ecology, forest policy, global forestry, Brazilian political economy, Latin American environmental politics, mining, and resistance to extractivism. He is currently studying the political economies of deforestation and the conflicts related to industrial forestry.
ORCID
Markus Kröger http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7324-4549
Notes
1 In 2012, a record low (but still high) area of only 4,571 km2 was clear-cut in the Brazilian Amazon, but by 2016, the figure had jumped to 7,989 km2 (Spera et al. Citation2016).
2 These contextual features make the pressure of deforestation much greater there than, for example, in the Tapajós-Arapiuns RESEX in Pará, which has no road access or nearby land access to pastureland expansion (although there are many other factors of deforestation).
3 Another parallel change that has begun to occur is the institutional-legal redefinition of RESEXs to accommodate cattle. The territorialized habituses change to ranchers through specific processes of ‘intersubjective transformation’ and connections (see Fraser Citation2018, for a framework on how to analyze such changes in detail). In a prior study, Hoelle (Citation2015, 144–146) argued that migrants in National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) settlements have taught the neighboring rubber tappers cattle raising and how to obtain ‘profits from land’. Hoelle believed that deforestation in the CMER would be kept under control, as it takes place mostly at the ‘fringes’; most of the CMER inhabitants are protected from becoming deforesting actors due to the ‘land-tenure system in structuring practice’ in an institutionalized way in RESEXs. However, as I show, the land-tenure system has in practice already changed to an informal land market, and the moral economic transformation seems to enable the expansion of ranching deep inside the CMER.
4 My analysis is based on participant observation among forest dwellers in different parts of the Brazilian Amazon since 2005, including several weeks of multisited political ethnography (see Schatz Citation2009) in Acre in May 2017 and in Pará in February 2018, expert interviews with powerholders in Brasília in November 2018, and other data that offer a comparative perspective on the longer-term research apparatus. Multiple data sources are used: policy documents (including internal ICMBio and government documents to which I was given access); semistructured interviews (30 in Acre in 2017); observation of dialogues; and statistics. These discourses were transcribed. I gathered knowledge about the changing lived environments by participant observation, which included moving about the pastures and forests targeted by capital with the involved social actors, asking them on site to discuss past or foreseen forest cover changes, and spending time among actual policymakers – particularly the conservation authorities, forest dwellers and activists but also politicians and cattle ranchers. The collected data were used to assess the four essential questions suggested by Bernstein (Citation2010): Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? What do they do with it? Expert interviews and longer-term interactions with people were used in process-tracing the answers to these questions to open up the causalities of deforestation. Providing answers to these questions makes the power play involved in agrarian political economy more visible, and assessing these factors allows the exploration of relations between political economy/development policies and deforestation.
5 See, e.g., Pearce (Citation2015).
6 Some general studies on the CMER have commented on the deforestation caused by ranching expansion (e.g. Vadjunec, Gomes, and Ludewigs Citation2009; Maciel et al. Citation2018; Mascarenhas, Brown, and Silva Citation2018), but these authors have not engaged in the critical analysis of this important phenomenon.
7 The situation in Acre has deteriorated in the direction forecast by Salisbury and Schmink (Citation2007), who assessed the struggle between cattle and rubber in an Acre Sustainable Development Project (PDS), an INCRA settlement undergoing a major process of deforestation via cattle expansion. As INCRA and environmental authorities have not really tackled this deforestation, many of my informants perceived that the key state organs had been colonized by logging/cattle interests.
8 There is already ample evidence that forest cover is generally much better retained in indigenous lands and conservation units (e.g. Nepstad et al. Citation2006); these have been mostly outside the reach of capitalisms.
9 There is no space here to discuss at length what happens in the upper echelons of the ‘value web’ of cattle capitalism, such as the Brazilian congress and the world’s largest meat producers (which are Brazilian and closely linked with the congress).
10 Per capita beef consumption in Acre has been estimated at 42.25 kilograms per year. Of the 9.67 million tons of beef produced in Brazil in 2013, only 1.6 million were exported; the rest was consumed in Brazil.
11 At the political and moral economic levels that I am assessing here, the current rubber tapper moral economy has several paradoxes that revolve around cognitive dissonance about the rising valuation of beef (requiring deforestation) and the lingering importance of forests. Rubber tappers agreed the most of all the different social groups interviewed by Hoelle (Citation2017, 751) with the statement that ‘a lunch with no meat leaves a person weak’ (90% agreed, while 70% of cowboys and 15% of NGO respondents agreed).
12 The 2012 New Forest Code (Law N° 12.651) increased deforestation in Brazil (Kröger Citation2017). Already before then, the 2006 Law of Management of Public Forests (N° 11.284) had increased logging schemes (Kröger Citation2018), which degrade forests and thus increase fires, opening up terrain for the subsequent expansion of pastures and other forms of deforestation (Fearnside Citation2017). On the positive side, the Lula government’s Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm) was effective in curbing Amazon deforestation rates, but the third phase of this plan, called Fostering Sustainable Production (2012–2015), did not result in lower deforestation (see Ministry of the Environment of Brazil Citation2018). This third phase focused on production, a policy concomitant with constantly rising forest degradation and deforestation rates inside multiple-use conservation units since 2011 (see Table 1 herein for the government figures: Ministry of the Environment of Brazil Citationn.d.).
13 In the current inefficient system (Fearnside Citation2017, 23), which relies on ‘using the Amazon as a frontier’ for expanding beef cattle production at a rate of one head per hectare (author’s interview, Cassio Alves, INIAMA, Belém 25 January 2018), cattle profits are short term and seriously infringe on future survival possibilities.
14 The publicly available IBGE figure for 2014 is 2.8 million.
15 ‘De meia’ refers to ’half,’ as sometimes in these irregular ‘contracts,’ the peasant gets half of the cattle that have been raised after the 3–4 year period by him. According to Tião de Moises (25 January 2019), the (ex-)rubber tappers assume the risks and costs in this case: they use so much of their own labour time and money to set up the ranch (pasture seed, pesticides, salt, etc) that ‘they do not make money with this but live deceived,’ while the one ‘who gained was the large rancher [who provided the initial herd], as the herd grew and fattened, and he took half of it.’
16 See Rosas (Citation2007).
17 Organizing and politicizing are two separate tactics for creating social movements (see Kröger Citation2013). By resistance agency, I refer to strategies of resistance that forge activists, that is, increase contentious agency; this is not thus just any type of isolated resistance act but signifies a broader process of creating new and more lasting collective, territorialized habituses, through a particular set of strategies.
18 There has been a generational change: many young people no longer know what uses trees can have or what trees there are and are unaware of the forest around them. However, they do not have the same social, cultural or economic capital as their city peers to seek urban jobs. According to my informants, many CMER teenagers have ended up in marginal positions and in prisons as they have moved away from the reserve.
19 The seringais close to the towns of Xapuri, Brasiléia and Epitaciolândia have become the most deforested, and the existence of access roads explained about 80% of deforestation in a 2013 study (Mascarenhas, Brown, and Silva Citation2018).