On the cutting edge of the Brazilian frontier: New (and Old) Agrarian questions in the south central Amazon

Abstract

The focus of this analysis is the zone of the Brazilian Amazon where the greater frontier has arrived from Rondônia and Mato Grosso states, where new productive systems and environmental and land colonisation policies have resulted in a complex agrarian structure. This ranges from traditional riverine peasant farms to agribusiness enterprises, which co-exist or interact economically, but as yet have not become embroiled in conflict. A Leninist model of agrarian transformation prevails in rice-soybeans-beef production in savannah areas, and a Kautskian model in the livestock ranching of the forested areas. The latter trend may develop into a Leninist pattern in the future, due to environmental policy and limits to land concession which generate land ownership concentration, thereby frustrating land reform policy.

Notes

1 The reference here is to the plot of the film Goodbye Lenin! (2003), directed by Wolfgang Becker, which concerns the attempt in 1989 by a young East German boy to protect his mother, a socialist with a weak heart who has been in a coma, from realizing that the GDR no longer existed. Among other things, her son ‘recreates’ on TV and video a united Germany where socialism has triumphed because it was a success – a GDR not as it was but as it should have been.

2 See Wilson 2001 for a critical evaluation of the post-productivist literature.

3 For an even earlier analysis of frontier colonisation, in the São Paulo area, see the still interesting monograph by Monbeig 1952. Also see Fowracker [1981], Hess [1982] and Margolis [1973] for the historical frontier settlement of the far south of Brazil.

4 This does not mean that there was no violence in the study area. Much rather the contrary, in that Humaitá and Apuí are relatively-speaking the most violent municipalities of Amazonas state; however, this situation is due not simply to conflict between large proprietors and smallholders. See Hoefle 2006 for an account and analysis of violence in the Central Amazon.

5 In his book A Selva, translated into twelve languages and first published in Lisbon during 1930, the Portuguese writer José Maria Ferreira de Castro 1962 describes the life of rubber tappers in Paraíso Grande, not far from the city of Humaitá. An elderly farmer in this community pointed out the tree under which Castro wrote the book and showed the researchers a copy sent to the community by the author. Prado Junior 1987 (1945)] provides a non-fictional account of the exploitative relationship between seringalistas and seringueiros. Previous research conducted in North-east Brazil has revealed how former rubber tappers – now elderly – characterised the difficulties of life under debt peonage relations in the Amazon.

6 The link between debt and labour relations is evident from many sources. For example, accepting that the seringuerio ‘pays nearly three times as much for his provisions as they cost the aviado’, and that ‘[a]ccording to a general rule, the [labour] contractor fixes the price [of rubber], and the gatherer is frequently never out of debt’, an early account [Oakenfull, 1914: 263–64, 265–66] of rubber production in Brazil clearly outlines the role of merchant capitalists in the division of labour: ‘The concessionary, or owner of the seringaes (rubber forests, or collection of trees producing rubber), is called the master seringueiro, or aviado. At the most convenient point he establishes a store (barracâo), where may be found every necessity and even luxury that man may require. We must presume that this aviado is a capitalist on a somewhat large scale. He may employ 200, 300 or even 500 men. Each man will be transported at the expense of the aviado to the forest, and will be advanced £40 to £70 worth of different goods, including provisions, arms and munitions, medicines, and clothing. The aviado is in turn exploited by the wholesale merchants (aviadores) of Manáos or Pará. Sometimes these latter give credit up to as much as £40,000. These latter are furnished with funds and goods by Yankee speculators, who receive payment in rubber at the end of the season. Each year 20,000 collectors [= rubber tappers] are employed, mainly from the States of Ceará or Bahia, and the rest are semi-civilized Indians, or natives of the rubber-producing states themselves.'

7 For a comparative analysis of rubber production in Brazil and Asia at the start of the twentieth century, see Akers 1914.

8 See Bicalho and Hoefle 2008 on fruit and vegetable farming destined for Manaus.

9 It should be noted that in rural Brazil the third reason is often advanced as a reason for having – hurriedly – to quit a particular location.

10 These figures concerning farm failure are not dissimilar to those found historically on the US frontier [Hine and Faragher, 2000.

11 Unlike either Lenin or Kautsky, who both saw differentiation in terms of class, and maintained that peasant smallholdings would not survive where capitalism penetrated agricultural production, Chayanov 1966 was a neo-populist theoretician who took the opposite view. According to him, therefore, because it was determined by the life cycle of the peasant family, petty commodity production remained more-or less the same, under feudalism, capitalism and even socialism. In short, peasant economy did not fragment along class lines, but varied only with the expansion or contraction in the membership of the individual household unit.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott William Hoefle

Ana Maria de Souza Mello Bicalho and Scott William Hoefle, Laboratório de Gestão do Território (LAGET), Departamento de GeografiaI GEO – CCMN, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Research funded by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq – Brazil) and the Institut pour la Recherche de Développement (IRD – France). In 2007, preliminary drafts were presented in the Latin American Centre Seminar Series of St. Antony's College Oxford and in the 15th Annual Colloquium of the IGU Commission on the Sustainability of Rural Systems at Rabat, Morocco. The authors would like to thank the editor Tom Brass for a number of useful suggestions and revisions. Scott William Hoefle can be contacted at [email protected]. Ana Maria Bicalho can be contacted at [email protected]