Is It Time to Engage With the Destroyers of the Amazon Rainforest?

During the 1990s, some settlement projects had grown large enough that needed a centre or administration nearby. Between 1988 and 1997, the number of municipalities in the Amazon increased dramatically. Dr. Alfredo Homma analysed this increase of municipalities in relation to deforestation in his book Historia da Agricultura na Amazonia (2003). A municipality requires road extension within its territory and building of an administrative centre. Families of the early settlers grow, or others arrive from outside to join them, and the population grows, putting further pressure on surrounding forests.

When the so-called social-environmentalist approaches were taken after Rio Summit in 1992, these settlers were encouraged to sustainably conduct their agriculture in the Amazon. The family farming credit schemes enabled "associativism" among the small and medium sized farmers to collectively learn the sustainable use of the land. Both national and international NGOs deployed various sustainable agricultural and business projects, targeting new associations and cooperatives, and the government largely supported these projects. Though in a pilot scale, municipalities were also directly encouraged to engage in sustainable forest management such as in the green municipality project of the International Centre for Forestry Research (CIFOR).

However, this associativism-based social-environmentalism changed in the late 2000s, when agrobusinesses (owned by external companies and by earlier settlers expanding their ranches and farms) started to expand in these settlement projects-based municipalities. Large agribusinesses set aside forest reserves, following environmental regulations at the time (leaving 80% of a new property as forest) while taking family farmers' land or labour as their properties. The deforestation and forest burning rates dropped because of this land property concentration, marginalization and proletarianization of family farmers. This was especially evident in soy frontiers in the southwestern to central fringes of the Amazon.

The municipalities that are allowing most forest burning to take place today coincide with such agribusiness frontiers, including Novo Progresso, Altamira, Sao Felix do Xingu or Itaituba in Para state. The constituents of these municipalities dominantly voted for Bolsonaro in 2018 in the first round by at least 60%. These voters are those who had gotten tired of being environmentally correct or being unable to encroach further into the forest, as their forefathers did, in order to establish new lands for their own use. They are perhaps also fiercely evangelical, believing in virtues of working on the land without knowing much about environmental stewardship as more conventional pastoral movements in Brazil taught in the countryside.

How to engage with the hardworking forest destroyers

When I look at the electoral map of 2018, municipalities in the eastern fringe of Para state, where the major deforestation frontier lied during the late 1990s - early 2000s, largely voted for Haddad, the Workers Party candidate. This is in a way surprising since when I lived in one of these municipalities (Sao Geraldo do Araguaia to be precise) in the early 2000s, few people supported the Workers Party. However, national NGOs and advocacy organizations with international funds were active then in trying to promote family farmer associations. These associations were supported to receive extension services for agroforestry practices and intensive cattle ranching and to commercialize the fruit and milk. The intervention was meant to discourage forest burning required for an extensive use of land. The organizations also collaborated with the municipal secretariat of environment in order to make the intervention more permanently present. The current mayor of Sao Geraldo is an extension service officer, and I suspect that this experience with trying to do something about intensive use of land or to keep their cooperative agriculture presumably encouraged people to turn to the Workers Party.

However, these experiences have not reached to deforestation frontiers that opened after mid-2000s. The global shift in international aid and funding structures in the later 2000s facilitated more concentrated use of money in obtaining large-scale and quick results in dropping deforestation rate. Thus, the small-scale agroforestry and agroindustry for the settlers who had already destroyed much of the forest did not become attractive. Instead, management of forest and indigenous reserves would receive more attention and funding, and large-scale sustainable agrobusiness operation would be encouraged under the aid and trade principle adopted by several European countries and the US. The shift practically killed NGOs and projects for family farmer associations that would require long-term engagement and cooperation with municipalities in the deforested land.

While funding reserves are important, without any practical support to encourage intensive use of land at the small-medium scale (remember, in the Amazon, 1000 ha is still a small property), the same scene of forest destruction will be repeated next year. The blind condemnation of Bolsonaro, as if he is the owner or manager of the Amazon rainforest, only encourages him or his environmental minister to aggrandize themselves. Instead, the international community needs to think about how to engage his constituents at the frontline of deforestation in governing their forest. In Brazil, to sustain largely means to sustain a family. We need to speak the same language as the forest destroyers in order to ultimately stop the extensive forest burning.