Susanna B. Hecht

Environment, Development and Politics: Capital Accumulation and the Livestock Sector in Eastern Amazonia

Summary - Deforestation and environmental degradation are increasingly common themes in the literature on humid tropical rural development. This paper explores the frameworks used to analyze environmental questions in developing economies and how well these function in the particular case of livestock development in the Eastern Amazon Basin. The paper argues that, due to the peculiarities of the state subsidies available for ranching activities that spurred a frenzy of land speculation, the exchange rather than productive value of land became paramount. In such a context, cautious land management was irrelevant and serious environmental degradation was the result. The paper suggests that models of environmental degradation that focus only on the question of production cannot capture the environmental dynamics of speculative economies.

Agricultural intensification and changes in cultivated areas, 1970–2005

Does the intensification of agriculture reduce cultivated areas and, in so doing, spare some lands by concentrating production on other lands? Such sparing is important for many reasons, among them the enhanced abilities of released lands to sequester carbon and provide other environmental services. Difficulties measuring the extent of spared land make it impossible to investigate fully the hypothesized causal chain from agricultural intensification to declines in cultivated areas and then to increases in spared land. We analyze the historical circumstances in which rising yields have been accompanied by declines in cultivated areas, thereby leading to land-sparing. We use national-level United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization data on trends in cropland from 1970–2005, with particular emphasis on the 1990–2005 period, for 10 major crop types. Cropland has increased more slowly than population during this period, but paired increases in yields and declines in cropland occurred infrequently, both globally and nationally. Agricultural intensification was not generally accompanied by decline or stasis in cropland area at a national scale during this time period, except in countries with grain imports and conservation set-aside programs. Future projections of cropland abandonment and ensuing environmental services cannot be assumed without explicit policy intervention.

The logic of livestock and deforestation in Amazonia

M ost cleared forest in Latin Americas lowland tropics will eventually become pasture. This transformation is one of the most salient environmental changes of the last 25 years. The incineration of large areas of high-biomass forest in Amazonia currently generates 10-15% of the total carbon additions to the atmosphere (Dickensen 1987, Myers 1989). Forest conversion banishes from biological history several species every day. Local impact includes siltation of smaller creeks and rivers, sharp changes in microclimates, and shifts in the hydrological regimes (Salati and Vose 1984). Soil resources are also degraded (Fearnside 1979, Hecht 1985, Serrao and Toledo 1990). The environment is not the only victim. Forest peoples routinely watch their livelihoods and complex agricultures and forestry be reduced to ashes when the forest is burned for pasture. Peasants are often displaced by cattle ranchers in violent conflicts (Martins 1984,1990, Schmink and Wood 1992, Wagner 1990), though frequently peasants participate in short-term cropping of land on its way to becoming pasture. This article analyzes the logic and the economics of livestock in Amazo-

Globalization and Forest Resurgence: Changes in Forest Cover in El Salvador

ABSTRACT Globalization is often associated with deforestation, but its impacts on forest recovery are less known. We analyzed socioeconomic data, land-use surveys, and satellite imagery to monitor changes in woody cover in El Salvador from the early 1990s to the present. Even where rural population density exceeded 250 people per square kilometer, we documented a 22% increase in the area with more than 30% tree cover, and a 7% increase in the area with more than 60% tree cover. Woodland resurgence reflected processes including civil war, retraction of the agricultural frontier, and international migration and associated remittances. Agrarian reform, structural adjustment, and emerging environmental ideas also played a role in woodland dynamics. Remittances may be especially important for woodland recovery in El Salvador, enabling people in rural areas to buy food without all of them needing to grow and sell it. This study adds to our understanding of the complexity of land-use change in emerging globalized economies and of potential conservation approaches for inhabited landscapes.

Development or destruction: the conversion of tropical forest to pasture in Latin America.

This interdisciplinary study focuses on the effects of forest destruction in Latin America, caused by the expansion of cattle production into these seemingly under-utilized areas. The high ecological and social costs are analyzed from the perspective of several disciplines, including anthropology, animal science, the environmental sciences, forestry and natural resource economics. The contributors explore the dynamics of cattle production, its social and environmental effects and the alternatives to pasture conversions. The book is intended for anyone concerned with this rapidly vanishing ecosystem.

From eco-catastrophe to zero deforestation? Interdisciplinarities, politics, environmentalisms and reduced clearing in Amazonia

Brazils rate of deforestation has declined by more than 70% since 2004, a dynamic unimaginable even a decade ago. Even the worst drought in more than 100 years (2010) produced a flat clearing profile from 2009–2010, an unexpected result, since dry periods usually have clearing spikes. While deforestation continues throughout the tropics (and Amazonia), and the recent change in Brazils Forest Code has produced a modest increase in deforestation, there are significant processes that are slowing clearing and fostering woodland recovery. This paper outlines the multiplicities and interdisciplinarities of political ecologies, policies, politics scientific approaches and technologies that have moderated forest conversion and shaped Amazonias unusual, and unusually effective development and conservation conjunctures in Brazils post-authoritarian period. New institutional framings, ideologies, political decentralization, globalizations and an expanded arena for new social movements and civil society provided the context for this transformation. Changing environmental institutions, discourses and the relatively redistributive social pact that underpinned President Ignacio (Lula) da Silvas administration had a significant role in promoting more resilient land uses, monitoring, compliance and new markets, while regional social movements and national and international commodity boycotts affected more damaging ones. Finally, other forms of payment for environmental services, such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) and REDD+ are changing the value of standing forests. This paper describes how complex interdisciplinarities shaped the politics, policies and practices that slowed forest clearing. However, Amazonias politics are extremely dynamic: destabilizing processes, violence and indifferent national leadership could still reverse this remarkable turnaround.

Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America

Soy has become one of the worlds most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. The soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows with social relations deeply embedded in contested ecologies. In this introduction to the collection, we first describe the ‘neo-nature’ of the soy complex and the political economy of the sector in South America, including the new corporate actors and financial mechanisms that produced some of the worlds largest agricultural production companies. We then discuss key environmental debates surrounding soy agribusiness in South America, challenging especially the common arguments that agroindustrial intensification ‘spares land’ for conservation while increasing production to ‘feed the world’. We demonstrate that these arguments hinge on limited data from a peculiar portion of the southern Amazon fringe, and obfuscate through neo-Malthusian concerns multiple other political and ecological problems associated with the sector. Thus, discussions of soy production become intertwined with broader debates about agrarian development, industrialization and modernization. Finally, we briefly outline the contributions in this volume, and identify limitations and fruitful directions for further research.

Forests lost and found in tropical Latin America: the woodland ‘green revolution’

Forest dynamics in the Latin American tropics now take directions that no one would have predicted a decade ago. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped by over 80 percent, a pattern mimicked elsewhere in Amazonia, and is down by more than a third in Central America. Forest resurgence – increasing forest cover in inhabited landscapes or abandoned lands – is also expanding. In Latin America, woodland cover is increasing, at least for now, more than it is being lost. These dramatic shifts suggest quite profound and rapid transformations of agrarian worlds, and imply that previous models of understanding small-farmer dynamics merit significant review centering less on field agriculture and more on emergent forest regimes, and in many ways a new, increasingly globalized economic and policy landscape that emphasizes woodlands. This paper analyzes changing deforestation drivers and the implications of forest recovery and wooded landscapes emerging through social pressure, social policy, new government agencies, governance, institutions, ideologies, markets, migration and ‘neo-liberalization’ of nature. These changes include an expanded, but still constrained, arena for new social movements and civil society. These point to significant structural changes, changes in tropical natures, and require reframing of the ‘peasant question’ and the functions of rurality in the twenty-first century in light of forest dynamics.

The new Amazon geographies: insurgent citizenship, “Amazon Nation” and the politics of environmentalisms

This article reviews the main themes—we are here; this is who we are; insurgent citizenship; Amazon Nation—elaborated in this collection of papers on new Amazonian geographies, and extends their implications to ideas about governmentality and regional identity. The article contextualizes the papers in this issue through understanding Amazonias role in the structuring of the contemporary Brazilian state through resistance to conventional modernist authoritarian development planning, and the creation of current places and politics through the assertion of new forms of citizenship, identity, governance and the rise of socio-environmentalisms as part of a new “statecraft” from below. Modern Amazonia has reasserted itself by developing a set of alternative epistemes and practices which can be seen, in their language and ideologies, to invoke the idea of the “Amazon nation.” This article emphasizes the cultural underpinnings of these processes in a contested Amazon that is now a major supplier of global agricultural commodities in its deforested landscapes, and pivotal for local livelihoods and planetary environmental services in its forested ones.

Defenders of the Amazon

The conflict between developoment, ecology and the rights of forest dwellers in the Amazon region has resulted in deadly violence.