ELITE LANDOWNERS IN SANTARÉM: RANCHERS, GAÚCHOS AND THE ARRIVAL OF SOYBEANS IN THE AMAZON Ryan Thomas Adams

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology, Indiana University July 2010

UMI Number: 3423602

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Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Doctoral Committee:

________________________________________ Richard Wilk, Ph.D.

________________________________________ Eduardo S. Brondízio, Ph.D.

________________________________________ L. Shane Greene, Ph.D.

________________________________________ Leah K. VanWey, Ph.D.

May 10, 2010

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© 2010 Ryan Thomas Adams ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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I dedicate this work to my daughter, Goldie Rose Adams. The first food she tasted was Açaí, on the porch of our house in Santarém.

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank my research committee. I am grateful to Rick Wilk for his confidence in my abilities. It inspired me to have his trust. I also want to thank him for his probing questions and profound, yet pragmatic vision of ―theory.‖ This work is due in no small part to his effort in guiding me toward completion. Eduardo Brondízio is a real inspiration to those who have the privilege of working with him because of his optimism, enthusiasm, and cooperative approach to research and education. I am consistently inspired by his generous attitude toward students and colleagues. Shane Green has been a fantastic resource, and I have enjoyed our discussions related to research and the complications of academic life. Leah VanWey has consistently been a trusted source of advice for me through the years. Whether the topic is related to scholarship, life in Santarém, academic strategies, or finding a good balance between work and family, I have appreciated her frank views and kind words. Many faculty members have advised me and helped shape my approach to anthropology. Emilio Moran was influential and provided guidance, support, and advice. This research project was inspired by his observation, during a graduate seminar, that more ethnographic work is needed to understand large-scale landowners in the Amazon. I am grateful for the opportunity he provided to work with his various research endeavors through the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC) and the Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change (ACT) at Indiana University (IU). Elinor Ostrom attended my first research presentation and was willing to offer advice on many occasions. I have benefited from the support and guidance of many of the faculty in the Anthropology Department at IU, including Gracia Clark, Della Cook, Ray DeMallie, Kevin Hunt, Paul Jamison, Anya v

Royce, Jeanne Sept, Nazif Shahrani, Beverly Stoeltje, and Catherine Tucker. I sincerely feel it was a tremendous privilege to learn from such a remarkable group of anthropologists. I also want to thank Tom Evans in the Department of Geography for helping me understand GIS and Joanna Broderick for her detailed comments on drafts of this work. This research was developed with the financial support from the National Science Foundation (Grant # SBR-9521918), which through CIPEC provided me with a Fellowship from 2001 to 2004. Preliminary research was made possible by a David C. Skomp Summer Research Award from the Anthropology Department. My research was funded by a grant from IIE Fulbright. Portions of this research were presented at academic conferences with support from a College of Arts and Sciences Travel Award and the Anthropology Department. While writing my dissertation, I was supported by a Future Faculty Teaching Fellowhship through The Graduate School at IU and as a lecturer in the Anthropology Department and University College at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). During my time at IUPUI, I have been especially appreciative for the mentoring and advice I have received from Sue Hyatt, Paul Mullins, and Larry Zimmerman, who have gone out of their way to help me become a better instructor and anthropologist. In University College, I have learned a great deal about teaching and helping students succeed, and I want to single out Sarah Baker, Lauren Chism, Leslie Miller, David Sabol, and Regina Turner for sharing their wisdom and insights in regard to first-year students, Critical Inquiry, Themed Learning Communities, course development, and the classroom experience in general. In Brazil, my fieldwork was made possible because of the institutional support I received from Embrapa Amazônia Oriental. I want to thank Olinto Gomes da Rocha Neto in the Santarém office, and Tatiana Sá, the Director General of Embrapa Amazônia Oriental at the time. José vi

Benito Guerrero and David Cleary at The Nature Conservancy shared their time, resources, and considerable knowledge. Ima Vieira at Museu Goeldi, Cristoval Sena at the Bonerges Sena Library in Santarém and many researchers at Embrapa in Belém provided important resources for this research. Gilmar Tirapelle at Cargill Santarém was very generous in sharing his vision and much of the history about Cargill’s efforts in the region. The researchers and staff at the office of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia were helpful, and I was grateful for their willingness to let me use their office space with air conditioning and highspeed Internet. In particular, I want to thank Paulo Coutinho and Bethany Reed for helping me feel ―at home‖ in Santarém. David McGrath, Frank Merry, and Dan Nepstad provided many important insights and were very generous with their time and resources. In Alter do Chão, I was lucky to meet and become friends with several other scholars, including Paulo Brando and Ruben Valbuena. There were so many wonderful farmers and ranchers who opened their homes and their lives to me, who shared their ideas, hopes, and fears. They showed me their farms, ranches, and businesses, and they took the time to explain so many things that were mysteries to me but perfectly obvious to them. In particular, I would like to thank Luis Assunção, Luis Chaves, Paulo Corrêa, and Pio Stefanelo, but many others also deserve my gratitude. I am grateful to The Santarém Rural Union (Sirsan) and their members for inviting me to present my work and solicit interviews from the membership and to CooperAmazon for their invitation to attend the inauguration and to see their new facilities, even before they were ready. My ―home‖ during graduate school at IU was at ACT. The colleagues and friends (most were both) I found at ACT are part of the fondest memories I have of my time in graduate school. The student researchers and staff, including Paula Dias, Scott Hetrick, Tarkan Kacmaz, Vonnie vii

Peischl, Kelsey Scroggins, Melissa Strickland, and Patti Torp were fantastic and supportive. I spent a lot of time in ―the cave‖ with other research assistants and graduate students, and these were among my closest friends and colleagues at IU. We shared ideas and drafts of papers. Some of them commented on drafts of this dissertation. Many thanks to Bryn Bakoyéma, Mateus Batistella, Angie Martin Beck, Bruce Boucek, Tony Cak, Fábio de Castro, Kara Cebulko, Jessica Chelakis, Stefano Fiorini, Alejandro Flores, Corey Hiyashi, Zohra Ismail, Thomas Ludewigs, Doris Navarro, and Angélica Toniolo for their camaraderie and collegiality. There are so many fellow students who were important to me personally and in shaping my approach to anthropology. Many of these relationships continue to be important in my professional and personal life. Kelly Branam is a dear friend and carefully read several chapters of this manuscript. Kate Costello was also helpful as part of our ―dissertation support group.‖ I have had so many personal and collegial friendships during my time at IU that I cannot mention everyone by name, but I do want to acknowledge a few who have been particularly supportive— Emma Bate, Katie Boswell, Matthew Bradley, Corinna Cosentino, Evelyn Dean-Olmsted, Cameron Griffith, Katherine Metzo, Dan Osborne, Staffan Peterson, Patricia Pitaluga, Julienne Rutherford, Diane Warren, Josh Wells, and Sarah Wille. Finally, I want to thank my family for their love, encouragement, and support. My interest in environmental anthropology was in some ways inspired by my childhood, spent watching nature programs, hiking, and camping with my Dad. Mom and Scott, you have been there for me throughout this long (and at times very difficult) process. I love you!

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Ryan Thomas Adams Elite Landowners in Santarém: Ranchers, Gaúchos, and the Arrival of Soybeans in the Amazon This dissertation is an ethnographic study of large-scale landowners in Santarém, Pará State, Brazil in 2005. I investigated immigrant large-scale farmers who were using modern industrial farming techniques, as well as the established local elite who were mainly engaged in large-scale ranching and business. The immigrant group, called Gaúchos, arrived in the area from Southern and Central-Western Brazil when Cargill opened a deepwater port facility in Santarém in 2003 to transport soybeans from South America to Asia and Europe. The research asks whether or not the two groups of large-scale landowners would form a single landed elite class, as implied by a class analysis based in political economy. When I began the study it appeared that the immigrant and local elites would remain separate, because of their distinct economic positions, cultural values, and regional identities. It looked like the Gaúchos would simply displace the local elite. My research found that the two groups of landowners reached a tentative alliance based on a common ideology of modernity and development, and on their shared opposition to the goals of foreign-based, environmentalist non-government organizations and Brazilian social activists. The elite groups reached their accommodation through new social and economic institutions. This research has broad implications for our understanding of agricultural expansion in the Amazon. It is one of the first ethnographic studies of wealthy landowning classes on the expanding frontier of industrial agriculture in the neotropics. ________________________________________ Richard Wilk, Ph.D.

________________________________________ L. Shane Greene, Ph.D.

________________________________________ Eduardo S. Brondízio, Ph.D.

________________________________________ Leah K. VanWey, Ph.D. ix

Table of Contents List of Figures .................................................................................................................................................................... xii List of Tables ...................................................................................................................................................................... xv

Chapter 1: Introduction ..........................................................................................................1 Research Setting and Study Area ................................................................................................ 2 Globalization, Political Ecology, and Rural Elites.................................................................. 7 Integrating Globalization, Political Ecology, and Rural Elite Studies through Ethnography.............................................................................................................. 16 Chapter 2: Soybean Expansion in Brazil: Political Economy and Agricultural Economics ................................................................................... 22 The Expansion of Soybean Production Is Shaped by Government Policy, Changes in the Global Food System, and Rising Internal Demand ........................ 27 Expansion into Central West...................................................................................................... 32 Economic Incentives ..................................................................................................................... 34 Brazilian Concerns about Territory ........................................................................................ 36 “Gaúchos” .......................................................................................................................................... 37 Agronomy .......................................................................................................................................... 39 Chapter 3: Debating the Future of the Amazon ........................................................... 42 The Amazon as Paradise/The Amazon as a Green Hell ................................................... 43 Early Academic Studies: Adaptations to Biophysical Environmental Conditions.................................................................................................................................... 47 Political Ecology: The State and Elites Exploit the Environment and the Poor ................................................................................................................................................ 51 Land-Use and Land-Cover Change Studies ........................................................................... 56 Chapter 4: Studying Large-Scale Landowners: Challenges, Ethical Dilemmas, and Methodology ......................................................................... 61 Challenges ......................................................................................................................................... 62 Ethical Dilemmas: Which side am I on? ................................................................................. 66 x

The Process of Gaining Rapport ............................................................................................... 73 Methodology..................................................................................................................................... 78 Accuracy and Precision of Data ................................................................................................ 87 Data Analysis .................................................................................................................................... 89 Chapter 5: The Arrival of Mechanized Agriculture in Santarém ........................... 90 Not Just Economics: The Vision and Self-Perception of Gaúcho Migrants ............... 93 Ideas about Migration and Identity as Missionaries of Modernity ............................. 98 The Process: Establishing a Farm in Santarém.................................................................102 Expenses and Costs......................................................................................................................110 “Pull” Factors: The Local Elite Invite Mechanized Agriculture ...................................116 Promoting Mechanized Agriculture and Disseminating Results ...............................121 Agribusiness ...................................................................................................................................124 Summary..........................................................................................................................................129 Chapter 6: Local Elite in Santarém – Strategies for Building and Maintaining Wealth...................................................................................... 131 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................131 How the Local Elite Gained Their Position: Kinship and Cautious Investments ..............................................................................................................................132 The Economic History of the Santarém Elite .....................................................................135 How the Local Elite Adapted to the Mechanized Agriculture Boom ........................157 Land-Use Changes by the Local Elite ....................................................................................166 Summary..........................................................................................................................................170 Chapter 7: Environmentalist Pressure Leads to an Alliance between the Gaúchos and the Local Elite....................................................................... 172 Environmentalism and Social Activism in the Amazon .................................................178 The Fight against Soybeans in Santarém ............................................................................195 The Alliance Is Formed ..............................................................................................................203 Why an Alliance? ..........................................................................................................................215 Policy Implications ......................................................................................................................218 xi

Patron/Client Relationship and Economic Development.............................................221 Future Research ............................................................................................................................224 Appendix 1: Migration Trajectories of Soybean Farmers’ Paths to Santarém ................226 Appendix 2: Information Sheet for Rural Union Meeting with Landowners ....................227 References Cited .........................................................................................................................................229

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List of Figures Figure 2.1. Production regions of Brazil ..................................................................................... 23 Figure 2.2. Soybean production in Brazil, 1960–2006 .......................................................... 24 Figure 2.3. Brazilian soybean production, 1960–1980 ......................................................... 29 Figure 3.1. The colonist footprint .................................................................................................. 57 Figure 4.1. The author interviewing a landowner .................................................................. 81 Figure 4.2. Example of interview map (with landowners’ names obscured). Pink represents land that is under use, while dark green is forested land. .................................................................................................................. 81 Figure 5.1. Examples of Gaúchos’ migration paths to Santarém ....................................... 92 Figure 5.2. Farmers watching soy being harvested as part of a local farm tour, 2003..................................................................................................................................103 Figure 5.3. A former smallholder farmstead, now owned by a large-scale farmer ..............................................................................................................................105 Figure 5.4. A local land agent in Santarém ...............................................................................108 Figure 5.5 The waiting area of the IBAMA office. This waiting area was very familiar to nearly all the landowners I spoke with ........................................110 Figure 5.6. A repossessed tractor for sale at a local tractor dealership ........................114 Figure 5.7. The unsightly construction at the main branch of the Bank of Brazil was referred to emblematically as an example of “development” by the local landowners and as an example of the lack of “modern” facilities by arriving farmers ...............................................116 Figure 5.8. Amazon River floodplain cross-section showing levee slope ....................118 Figure 5.9. Cargill facility built in Santarém ............................................................................126 Figure 5.10. The cost savings for shipping soy from the Central West to Rotterdam via Santarém vs. Southeast Brazil ($12/ton) and from the Central West to Shanghai via Santarém vs. Southeast Brazil ($10/ton) .....................................................................................................................126 Figure 6.1. The author with a local landowner who actively diversifies his operation throughout his kinship network. The landowner’s father and children specialized in areas of the farm enterprise ...............134 Figure 6.2. Example of the continuing sense of identification among Confederate descendants in Santarém ...............................................................138 Figure 6.3. Examples of the boats used to transport goods and people between Manaus, Santarém, and Belém . Some of the boats are xiii

owned and operated by landowners based in Santarém. The Cargill facility can be seen in the background .................................................145 Figure 6.4. Two major roadways in Santarém, indicated in yellow. BR-163, on the left, is the Santarém-Cuiabá Highway, connecting Santarém to the Central West. PA-370, on the right, connects Santarém to the Curuá-Una Dam to the southeast of the city .....................................................147 Figure 6.5. Map of Santarém showing neighboring cities, including Óbidos and Monte Alegre ........................................................................................................148 Figure 6.6. The Amazon Park Hotel, built when money related to the gold boom was flowing through Santarém, was an example of the capacity of Santarém to have modern, upscale accommodations. It has since fallen into disrepair. ...............................................................................153 Figure 6.7. The author with a local landowner who has invested in grain processing ......................................................................................................................162 Figure 6.8. Downtown Santarém, 2003 .....................................................................................164 Figure 6.9. Downtown Santarém, 2005. The same location as in Figure 6.8, two years later..............................................................................................................165 Figure 7.1. Deforestation rate in the Legal Amazon, 1988–2008 ....................................176 Figure 7.2. Percent of clearing events and percent of land area cleared by property size .................................................................................................................177 Figure 7.3. Cover from Time magazine, September 1989 ..................................................179 Figure 7.4. A resident of one of the villages that now lies within a protected area conducting an ecotour and demonstrating an example of useful plants along a path that connects two villages ...................................183 Figure 7.5. Ecotourists listening to local folklore at a stop at one of the riverside villages in the Tapajós National Forest ...........................................184 Figure 7.6. One of the most popular ecotourism activities is a long hike to view some of the massive trees in the Tapajós National Park ..................185 Figure 7.7. “Vast swaths of Brazil's Amazon rainforest continues [sic] to be cleared despite environmental concerns. Photograph: Stephen Ferry/Getty.” The article associated with this image quotes Greenpeace and Conservation International in support of the claim that Brazil is destroying the forest. ..........................................................187 Figure 7.8. An opinion pamphlet, “The ‘Green Mafia’ fights against the Central-West/Amazon corridor,” widely circulated among Amazon farmers ..........................................................................................................189 Figure 7.9. Map showing the Amazon as an international forest reserve....................191

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Figure 7.10. Greenpeace using their ship The Arctic Sunrise to block the port in Santarém. A boat from Santarém is in the foreground, trying to push the Greenpeace boat back from the Cargill port facility ...........198 Figure 7.11. Greenpeace activists being arrested in Santarém ........................................198 Figure 7.12. A banner hung in a farmer’s field .......................................................................200 Figure 7.13. Flyer produced by Greenpeace to be distributed in England for their anti-soy campaign .........................................................................................200 Figure 7.14. A banner hung in a farmer’s field indicating a link between multinational agribusiness and fast-food chains .........................................201 Figure 7.15. A poster for one of the public forums related to the debate about paving the BR-163 Highway ................................................................................210 Figure 7.16. Large-scale landowners attending a participatory democracy “Public Forum” meeting in Santarém ...............................................................211 Figure 7.17 Large-scale landowners participate in a public forum related to paving the BR-163 Highway ................................................................................211 Figure 7.18. The ceremony launching CooperAmazon in Santarém, November 2005 ...............................................................................................................................213

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List of Tables

Table 4.1. Structured and unstructured interviews conducted in Santarém ............... 82 Table 5.1. Evaluation of experimental soybean plots ..........................................................120 Table 5.2. Classification of land in Santarém according to the level of technology that should be employed by the producers. ...............................123

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Chapter 1 Introduction

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, large-scale industrial agriculture has begun in Santarém, Pará State, Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon. The idea of modern agribusiness in the Amazon strikes some as a contradiction to the image of a pristine rainforest, and reinforces the cynical view that the Amazon is being blindly wiped out by capitalist forces, but the expansion of agribusiness is viewed as a positive development by those who seek new ways to generate economic growth in one of the poorest regions of Brazil. Understanding the place of the farmers who have arrived to grow soybeans in the Amazon is an essential element needed to provide an accurate description of the soybean economy and what possibilities are created or impeded by this development. This research explains an alliance between two groups of large-scale landowners in the Brazilian Amazon, following the arrival of agribusiness. Political economy would suggest that class interests would lead the local elite to join with the new arrivals and participate in the new agribusiness-led economic development. In the Amazon, where deforestation rates are high and rural society is sharply divided in terms of social class, a Political Ecology perspective would predict that this elite class would then increase inequality and destroy the environment. Due to the historical differences within Brazil and distinct regional identities, an alternative prediction of the interaction between the local elite and the arriving farmers suggests that capitalized farmers from the South would dominate the local Amazon elite. The local elite would be replaced as globalized agribusiness moves into the Amazon. My research shows that instead of a

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simple alliance based on class identity, or a replacement of the local elite by outsiders when global agribusiness arrives, the two groups of landowning elites reached an accommodation. The conditions that mediate this accommodation involve a shared vision of development, confrontation with environmentalists and social activists, shared institutions, and eventually kinship ties. The farmers from outside the region adopt some of the customs and social responsibilities of the local elite, showing a degree of flexibility in the penetration of global agribusiness, in order to become established in local settings. The implications for future development and research in similar areas are that agribusiness does not simply take over, that rural elite identity shapes the outcome of development debates and that Political Ecology studies of the Amazon need to be more sensitive to the internal dynamics of rural elite. In order to examine rural elite identity and class dynamics of landowners, my study is based in a region of the Brazilian Amazon that is experiencing a transformation as large-scale agriculture moves into an area previously dominated by much lower-technology land uses.

Research Setting and Study Area The most prominent consequences of development in the Amazon are the high rates of deforestation and the endemic poverty in the region. The deforestation rate has fluctuated over the years but remains troubling (Caldas et al. 2007; Fearnside 2005). Economic pressure related to the expansion of soybeans and cattle ranching into the Amazon is said to be driving this deforestation (Fearnside 2001; Nepstad et al. 2006), and both of these industries have grown in recent years (Brown et al. 2007; Faminow 1998; Nepstad et al. 2006). 2

Research into the process of deforestation and land-use practices has revealed a great deal about small- and medium-scale colonist landowners (Batistella et al. 2003; Brondízio 1996; Browder 1994; Browder et al. 2004; Cochrane and Sanchez 1982; Faminow 1998; Fearnside 1990; Moran 1981; Moran 1993b; Moran et al. 2006; Perz 2002; Smith 1982; VanWey et al. 2007; Walker and Homma 1996; Walker et al. 2000; Wood and Porro 2002). In order to understand the drivers of deforestation, studies of land-use change in the Amazon have used teams of interviewers to collect a spatially representative sample of land-use decision makers (Brondízio et al. 2002; Evans and Moran 2002; McCracken et al. 1999; Moran and Brondízio 1998; Moran et al. 2003; Moran et al. 2006). This method has been successful in identifying relationships among demographic, environmental, and social processes in the region, but it has limitations when applied to large-scale landowners. The interview team has limited time to gain access to the large-scale landowner, who might live outside the study area or might not want outsiders to know anything about his landholdings or business activities. It also is not necessarily time effective to invest heavily in capturing an adequate sample of large-scale landowners, because this type of landowner is not statistically representative of landowners in the region. Yet, the effect of land-use choices made by these owners is much greater than the effect of land-use choices made by smaller-scaled landowners, in terms of land area changed. One way to consider the impact of large-scale landowners’ decisions is to look at the impact of their decisions to clear land when compared to smaller-scale landowners. The majority of deforestation events are small clearings, but the relatively few large clearings were responsible for more than 80% of deforestation in the Legal Amazon in 2003 (Brondízio et al. 2009; INPE 2007). Kenneth Chomitz and Timothy Thomas (2001, p. ii) claim that 3

“almost half of Amazonian farmland is located in the one percent of properties that have more than 2,000 hectares.” While negative stereotypes about large-scale landowners make even responsible landowners hesitant to speak to an outside researcher, aggressive deforesters are even more unlikely to talk. Because of this reluctance, their behavior is less likely to have been captured by previous research. With large areas of land under their control, greater information about large-scale landowners may help to inform land-use change analyses generated by studies of small-scale and medium-scale landowners, as the motivations and considerations vary between landowners based on the size of their landholdings (VanWey et al. 2007). Despite the disproportionately large effect that large landowner decisions have on environmental outcomes, researchers have not adequately examined their ideas, motivations, and social relations. This study is an examination of large landowners and their ideas, motivations, and social relations. It is centered on two groups of large-scale landowners who each own more than 1,000 hectares of land. The local landowners are mainly cattle ranchers, and the terms “local elite” and “ranchers” are used to refer to them. The farmers who immigrated from the South are referred to as Gaúchos by the people of Santarém, and I use that term or “farmers” to refer to them. There is a more in-depth discussion of the term “Gaúcho” as an identity marker in Chapter 2. The term “rural elite” refers to all large-scale landowners in the area—ranchers/local elite and Gaúchos/farmers. During my fieldwork, I worked with some who owned less than 1,000 hectares of land by virtue of circumstance or because they were still assembling their farms, who were socially and culturally members of the

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landowning class. In order to understand the large-scale landowners’ social relationships and their economic decisions, it is necessary to understand what happened when these two distinct groups of rural elites encountered each other. The large-scale landowners in this study own land near the city of Santarém, Pará State, Brazil. Due to the enormous scale and heterogeneous nature of environmental and social conditions in the Amazon, no single site is generalizable to the regional scale (Moran 1993a). Santarém, however, presents features that are useful in understanding rural elites more broadly and relevant to debates about the future of the Amazon. It is centrally located between Manaus and Belém, the two largest cities in the Amazon, and lies at an important junction of the Amazon and Tapajós Rivers in a region that includes extensive floodplains, upland areas with savannas, and a rainforest ecosystem (Macedo 2002). The position of the city relative to infrastructure is significant, as the main north-south road through the central part of the Amazon, Highway BR-163, terminates in Santarém. A debate about whether this road should be paved was an important topic during my primary fieldwork period in 2005, as would be expected in a situation of expanding mechanized agriculture. “The simplification of the municipal ecology through removal of native vegetation and grading of soils makes crop growth and sale dependent on movement of material into and out of the area. Under these conditions transportation has become a central focus through which contending interests wrestle for a share of the wealth produced in the region” (Fisher 2007, p. 350). Santarém is an apt site to study both the class dynamics lying behind environmental changes and social conflict because the large landowners are cattle ranchers, the deforestation rate is high, both urban and rural populations are extremely poor, and yet Santarém shows potential for economic development. 5

Santarém is also well suited to an ethnographic study of large-scale landowners’ sizable population with several phases of immigration, including migrants from the Northeast, South, Central West, other regions in the Amazon, and other countries, in particular the USA and Japan. The flow of immigrants into the area was not constant, but there were periods of intense population growth due to in-migration, such as the 1960s, when the population grew by 196% (Steward 2007). The migrants during this period were primarily from the Northeast. Following this, there were multiple resettlement initiatives overseen by the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) during the 1970s and 1980s, which brought migrants to the area both officially and unofficially. These migrants rarely obtained legal land title (Futemma and Brondízio 2003) and were extremely poor (Moran et al. 2006), although their new rural communities included government schools, health clinics, athletic fields, churches, stores, public cemeteries, and canals (Steward 2007). During the period of my fieldwork, the social and economic situation related to large-scale landowners in Santarém was changing. When my preliminary research began in 2003, the farmers from outside the region began arriving and buying land to assemble into large farms. This marked the beginning of a strong wave of migration into Santarém for farmers from the South (Steward 2004). These events created a context that was well suited to understanding the dynamics among large-scale landowners and their position relative to other social actors. The regional context, including previous studies with colonist farmers, the suitability of the site relative to the ecology, and immigration patterns of the wider region, is important to understand the implications of this research project, but the theoretical implications of this research outside the Amazon must be considered, as well. 6

Globalization, Political Ecology, and Rural Elites I contextualize the social position of large-scale landowners in three bodies of literature related to globalization, Political Ecology, and the study of rural elites. The project is also broadly contextualized in terms of changes in agriculture during this century. The growth of industrial agriculture around the world has produced plentiful supplies of food and brought a wide range of food to consumers year round, but there have been a number of negative consequences (Falcon 1970; Pollan 2006). For example, other land-use systems were replaced and global agribusiness expanded at the expense of local social systems. The consequences of this expansion included the loss of family farms, threats to the rights of peasants and indigenous groups using non-industrial agricultural systems, and ecological consequences related to the loss of natural ecosystems and the indirect effect of inputs used in industrial agriculture. The way in which agriculture is carried out throughout the world has changed dramatically in the past 70 years, partially due to the “green revolution,” a term coined in 1968 by former USAID Director William Gaud (Miller 1977). Since its beginning in Mexico in the 1940s, the aim of the then unnamed green revolution was to improve crops and keep food production at pace with population growth through the use of technologies such as pesticides, irrigation projects, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. While improved seed and increased yields have been welcomed, the loss of soil fertility and crop biodiversity, and the health and environmental consequences of the heavy use of pesticides and herbicides associated with green revolution plant varieties have led to critiques of the new approach to agriculture (Griffin 1974). Some critics point out that the changes in social relations

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brought about by a shift to green revolution agriculture have led to increased inequality and exploitation (Shiva 1991). Others highlight how innovative techniques have rejuvenated rural culture and modernized the economies in which they are employed, in terms of technology innovations and a stronger connection to global capitalism (Singh 2001). In North America, the investments required to produce high-yield mechanized crops have led to a reduction in family farms and the social and economic deterioration of rural communities (Barlett 1993). Soybean farming in Santarém may follow the North American model, but it is likely that the social context of the Brazilian Amazon will have an influence on how soybean farmers make decisions, and understanding this social context and the effect it has on agriculture in Santarém could provide a comparative case for other locations with large-scale soybean agriculture. Prior to the rise of mechanized agriculture, Brazilian agricultural history was characterized as a series of boom-and-bust cycles and there was real pessimism about the potential to generate economically sustainable growth (Leeds 1957; Margolis 1972; Wagley 1953). From an economic development perspective, soybeans represent a real success story for Brazil, and there is an undeniable sense of pride among many Brazilians in seeing the soybean frontier march northward from the southern states (Globo Rural 2005; Veja 2004). Santarém is a well-known and relevant episode in the larger debate about the consequences of the expansion of the industrial agriculture in Brazil, The effects of this expansion and the social processes it reveals have implications for agricultural frontiers elsewhere. Economists and agronomists have studied the incentives and conditions of

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agricultural expansion in Brazil with a focus on the conditions that gave rise to the expansion of this activity and the likelihood of continued economic successes in mechanized agriculture, generally offering a positive view on industrial agriculture. For political economists, the expansion of capital-intensive global agribusiness into the Amazon is also seen as another example of an expected process of landscapes becoming more integrated with global capitalism. In understanding this process, they focus on the negative consequences for the former occupants of the landscape and the workers in industrial agriculture. Joe Foweraker’s (1981) classic analysis of frontier expansion in Brazil, for instance, predicted many of the features and effects of soybean expansion into the Central West and predicts a fully integrated capitalist landscape in Santarém. The pattern of frontier integration as an evolution of agriculture under capitalism can be seen from several perspectives. I situate the expansion and arrival of globalized agribusiness in Santarém in three bodies of literature: globalization, Political Ecology, and studies of rural elites.

Globalization While the pattern of frontier expansion and the conversion to larger consolidated farms are important influences on how people in Santarém live following the arrival of mechanized agriculture, the fact that the crop driving this change is soybeans may also be important to consider. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz (2003) sees a parallel between soybeans and his earlier analysis of sugar. He saw sugar as a tangible element of global economic change, colonialism, and a pivotal element in the construction of regimes of production in Latin 9

America and consumption in Europe (Mintz 1985). He recently suggested that soy may be the same type of globalized undifferentiated source of an elemental food component (protein in this case) that was represented by sugar/”sweetness” in his earlier analysis (Mintz 2003). The commodity (previously sugar, now potentially soy) represents not just an element moving through a system of exchange but also leads to a particular system of social articulation (Mintz 1959). Sugar production established rural elites in most of Latin America as the owners of production systems based on large landholdings and coercive labor relations in global commodity trading systems (Mintz 1959, Wolf 1982). For soybeans, Santarém is a local node of the larger global “protein” system and would come to exemplify a particular set of social relations that show commonalities and differences with other soybean-producing areas. This study, based in Santarém shows that soybean production triggers shifts in the social class position of rural elites suggesting that a worldwide protein/soy system could be altering social relations among rural elites in other production zones, as well. Speaking more broadly than Mintz, Malcolm Waters (2001) defines the concept of globalization in terms of a threefold process of economic Fordism (meaning a mass production system that reduces costs with intensive mechanization and economies of scale), decreased national sovereignty with increased international-level decision making, and an increase in cultural similarities across the world. Richard Wilk (1997) argues that globalization instead entails both increasing similarities and increasing differences. The idea that globalization is a singular thing that is reaching more places, which he calls the “Sherwin Williams Theory of Globalization,” ignores increased local distinctions and the greater variety in capitalist practices (Wilk 1995) If we take the perspective that 10

globalization is a non-uniform process, one of the most important issues that this view raises is, “How distinct are the various articulations between the global economic system and local elites?” Waters explains globalization in a way that suggests that local elites would become subsumed by the penetration of globalized capitalism. While theories of globalization show that the farmers and ranchers in the Amazon are acting in response to larger processes, a Political Ecology perspective shows the basis for response to these changes.

Political Ecology Changes in the global agricultural system have led to changes in land-use decisions in the Amazon. There are important ecological and social consequences of shifting forest or other ecosystems into industrial commodity production. Political Ecology links the negative environmental consequences, such as deforestation, to these social inequalities (Bates and Lees 1996; Escobar 1999; Gezon 2002; Greenberg and Park 1994; Haenn 1997; Peluso 1992; Sheridan 1988). Political Ecology has been used to study economic development in the Amazon during cycles of resource exploitation, such as timber, rubber, gold, and jute (Bunker 1988; Hecht and Cockburn 1989; Schmink and Wood 1992; WinklerPrins 2006). Smallholders are disadvantaged by the transition to mechanized agriculture and deforestation rates rise when it expands (Fearnside 2001; Foweraker 1981; Steward 2004, 2007). Peter Little (1999) argues that the concern with wider political economy in ecological anthropology paved the way for the emergence of Political Ecology, a term pioneered by 11

Wolf in 1972. Political Ecology tends to offer explanations in terms of competing alliances of actors and accompanying structures as the causes of problems in environmental health and social justice (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Vásquez-Leon and Liverman 2004). This approach has proven to be very flexible in adding political and institutional investigations to ecological studies, including those in the Amazon (Brondízio et al. in press). In one of the seminal Political Ecology studies of the Amazon, Marianne Schmink and Charles Wood (1992) show how competing social actors (such as “The Military,” “Colonists,” “Miners,” and “The Kayapó”) battle for control of resources in southern Pará. Their analysis is a careful examination of both the multidimensional bases of power—physical, economic, political, ideological—and the strategies adopted by participants in particular conflicts based on these various bases of power. “[T]he constitutive aspect of social process stresses the idea that both peasants and ranchers, in negotiating the contests that involved them and in the process of mobilizing the various sources of power at their disposal, continually reconstructed their respective interests, amending their strategies, bonds, and alliances accordingly” (Schmink and Wood 1992, p. 17). They treat large landowners as a unified identity based on class interest, a perspective complicated by my findings. Andrew Vayda and his student Brad Walters (1999) took the field to task for being biased in favor of political explanations even when politics was not the primary cause of an ecological event, in their article “Against Political Ecology.” They suggested that ecological events be given the central position in an analysis and that through progressive contextualization (a position Vayda [1996] had previously espoused) the “true causes” of that event would be discovered. The authors’ claim may be sound, in general, but my research suggests that even more attention to the “political” in Political Ecology may be 12

warranted in some cases, rather than less and that various processes intersect in ways that are not well suited to treatment as an “event.” The environmental consequences near Santarém, primarily deforestation, are not subtle, but the social dynamics driving industrial agriculture expansion in the Amazon involve some complicated dynamics that require more detailed ethnographic studies, such as this. Octavio Ianni (1979) sees the Amazon as a site of internal colonization at the hands of the Brazilian policy and economic elite. Southerners with better connections, cultural capital, and economic power strip the region of its riches and claim the profits. This perspective would suggest that when the Gaúchos arrived in the Amazon, they would have dominated the local elite and replaced them at the top of the social hierarchy. My research shows that, rather than exploiting the local elite and using their position within the Brazilian class system, the Gaúchos integrated with the local elite, accommodating local practices in many respects. The central focus of this work is the social dynamics within the large-scale landowner class that underlie an important ecological and social change. It complicates the traditional story line of Political Ecology in the Amazon by describing the way rural elites align themselves, internally within the context of a competition over resources. This work shows the transition between two culturally distinct groups to a new alliance under specific conditions and with important limits. It still features actors competing for resources, resulting in environmental degradation and an expansion of capitalist relations, but the internal dynamics of the large landowners are the focus, in this instance. The perspective of social classes competing for resources is useful in explaining some of what is happening in

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the Amazon, and my work contributes to Political Ecology literature, but the dynamics within social classes require the use of other bodies of literature to explain the relationship between the ranchers and Gaúchos in Santarém.

Rural Elites More than 30 years after Laura Nader (1972) called for anthropologists to “study up,” we still lack adequate studies of elite behavior. Inspired by student projects examining the California Insurance Commission and the Better Business Bureau, she questioned the classical anthropological focus on the disempowered, asking, “What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty?” (Nader 1972, p. 289) Her suggestion was that anthropology would gain a great deal through a concern with “the most powerful strata of urban society,” while at the same time society would gain through the involvement of anthropologists and the application of ethnographic tools to important sectors of society that remain obscure to outsiders (Nader 1972). There are many ways to trace the history of anthropology in reference to elites, but the work of Laura Nader (1972, 2001), George Marcus (1983), and Cris Shore and Stephen Nugent (2002; Nugent 1993) lays a useful path to understand the trajectory of this scholarship. Early work in political and economic anthropology addressed issues related to leadership and the control of resources, especially in studies of tribal and peasant societies (e.g., Barth 1956, Redfield 1960). These studies addressed issues of privilege, power, and 14

authority, but in the context of marginalized populations. The boldness of Nader’s (1972) call was to suggest that we should study those who are empowered and central to the decisions shaping the largest political and economic systems. Following up on Nader’s call, George Marcus (1983) edited a volume that included several studies of elites. The works in the volume addressed the types of institutions that Nader had identified as important, such as political and corporate leaders. In the review of the literature preceding the case studies, Marcus identified the gap that the volume intended to address: “There are relatively few studies by anthropologists of elites in bureaucratic or institutional contexts. Also lacking are anthropological studies of elites at the national level of complex societies, or elites whose organization must be defined internationally” (Marcus 1983, p. 37). The edited volume addressed these gaps in the literature by presenting studies of university administrators, Sicilian politicians, and bureaucrats in India, among others (Marcus 1983). Each study showed how the elite consolidated their position and described the nature of their relationships with the other members of society. To an extent, the concern with elites faded until Shore and Nugent (2002) revised the topic with a slightly different focus in Elite Cultures. This edited volume was divided into three sections on politics, traditions, and networks, social realms previously suggested by Nader (2001). For Nugent, Shore, and many of the contributors to this volume, however, the central question had shifted from a concern with the relationship of the elite with the wider society to a concern with the internal dynamics of an elite culture. “Understanding the external conditions and interests that promote and sustain local or national elites must also be matched with an analysis of the norms, values and shared interests that characterize or

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unite such elites – hence the focus of this book on elite cultures” (Shore and Nugent 2002, p. 13). In this dissertation, I follow Shore and Nugent with a primary focus on the internal dynamics of the large-scale landowner class, contextualized in terms of their relationships to the wider economic system and the small-scale landowners and workers with whom they interact. Instead of a focus on the political and corporate elite in an urban setting, my work returns to a rural setting to “study up” with rural elites.

Integrating Globalization, Political Ecology, and Rural Elite Studies through Ethnography This work uses ethnography to present a more nuanced view of social class in order to contribute to our understanding of rural elites, Political Ecology, and agricultural globalization. A Political Ecology perspective tends to see the elite behavior as being driven by class interests, although their behavior may also be conditioned by culture or identity. In studying globalization and agriculture, large-scale capitalized farming is treated as a singular economic activity carried out in various locations, In contrast, if farmers and ranchers are seen as economic actors whose behavior is not well captured by neoliberal theories presupposing rational responses to price signals, or by Political Ecology approaches assuming common social class interests, an ethnographic approach to understanding social class dynamics, such as this work, can inform each of these areas of literature. Economic anthropologists have combined the identity/discourse approach with Marxist analysis to develop a post-structuralist or post-Marxist analysis of economic activity that

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views economic decisions as cultured accommodations of economic structures (e.g., Miller 1997). Silvia Yanagisako (2002) argues that the utility of this approach is not due to the various “cultures of capitalism,” as studies based on Asian economies would seem to suggest (Hefner 1998), but instead due to the heterogeneous set of capitalist practices that articulated in various ways through local, national, and global pathways. “The forms that these diverse capitalist practices take and their articulation with each other must be empirically investigated rather than assumed” (Yanagisako 2002, p. 7). The internal diversity of “capitalized farming” has been shown in other contexts as well (Ruttan and Hayami 1984). Marshall Eakin (2002) shows how kinship networks and personal connections were the key factors behind the development of a particular variety of capitalism in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. His analysis roots the development of capitalist relations in the interaction between the political and economic histories of Belo Horizonte, the Brazilian economic context of that development, and the particular actions of specific firms and individuals. The kinshipbased “tropical capitalism” that Eakin describes certainly has application in Santarém, where kinship is intimately tied to economic practice. Large-scale ranchers in the Amazon have not adopted the more capitalized forms of agriculture, and their reluctance can be explained through reference to studies of the Political Ecology of the Amazon in combination with Frank Cancian’s (1979) oft-cited theory describing the intersection of economic class and technology adoption. The clear cultural distinctions between the two groups would indicate that they would not blend based on social class interests. Marvin Harris’ (1969) work with landed elites in

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Bahia reinforces this view, as his work depicts the elite as a closed society. “The three families which make up the framework of the highest stratum of the upper class have been part of the local political oligarchy for three or more generations. All of them have been connected and reconnected by marriage” (Harris 1969, p. 102). Harris’s work also laid the basis for the prediction that the Gaúchos would claim a social position above the local elite when they arrived in Santarém. The local elite in Harris’ work are positioned well below the elite of the metropolitan South. “In the big cities they are apt to lead rather anonymous lives and appear as undistinguished members of the middle class” (Harris 1969, p. 103). How and why would the two groups of landowners interact in Santarém? Will they maintain their different identities, with the important cultural distinctions between a local elite landowner from Santarém and a Gaúcho from the South serving as markers for the later to claim a position above the former? Although the two groups of elites I was studying were nearly indistinguishable from a Political Ecology perspective, they had significant internal variability and diversity. In addition to the internal diversity within the two categories of landowners, Gaúchos and the local elite have distinct cultural economies and different regional social histories in Brazil. Based on the literature, my expectation was that the two groups would either merge naturally due to their shared class position or the Gaúchos would dominate the local elite. The local landowners shared many negative impressions of Gaúchos with me, and the Gaúchos made many derogatory comments about the local elite, revealing that they perceived themselves to be quite distinct from one another. This antipathy led to an initial hypothesis that the two groups would not unify on the basis of class position, and my

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expectation was that the Gaúchos would simply replace the local elite at the top of the social class hierarchy in Santarém. When both the local elite and the Gaúchos became engaged in reacting to the environmentalists and social activists rallying against the expansion of industrial agriculture in the Amazon, their distinct historical experiences differently affected the way they reacted. The Gaúchos experienced great success in transforming the social, economic, and geographic structure of previous zones of influence, especially northern Mato Grosso, where many had owned land. These successes led them to believe in their power to transform a landscape and an economy. In fact, it seems to have provided them with a sense that these changes were inevitable. The Gaúchos are eager to expand their farms and find new areas to colonize in their missionary-style approach to shaping the Brazilian economy and landscape. In contrast, the local elite expressed a powerful sense of abandonment by the rest of Brazil, as the investment in infrastructure in the 1970s and the extension of credit in the 1980s both failed to bring about the modernization that they felt was promised. This sense of abandonment and the reward of a cautious approach in the face of uncertainty underlie many of their economic and social strategies. The local elite are cautious and see economic opportunities as fraught with risks. They recognize the potential loss of social position if they miscalculate and lose their wealth. Without solidarity between these two rural elites, however, the recently arrived farmers were in a precarious position, with no strong local ties or a sense of inclusion in the community. Given the success of soybean agriculture up to that point, there was little concern on their part about their potential isolation in 2003. Upon my return to the field in

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2005, many of the recently arrived farmers were heavily in debt due to expenses incurred in their efforts to establish their farms and the drop in prices for their two main commodity crops—soybeans and rice (Globo Rural 2005; Nepstad et al. 2006). They were also surprised to find themselves under a great deal of pressure from environmentalists and social activists due to concerns about the role of soybeans in deforestation and the social consequences of the consolidation of land ownership. The pressure from environmentalists proved to be an important catalyst in changing the internal dynamic within both types of large-scale landowners. I attended a ceremony to mark the opening of a new cooperative in Santarém, Cooperativa Amazônica in November 2005, as my fieldwork in Sanatarém was drawing to a close. The formation of a cooperative is big news, because it signifies a new period in the professionalization among the members and because it has practical implications for the economics of farming (Jepson 2006a). The way the cooperative was created may be more significant, however. The Santarém Rural Union, seen by many as the organization that represents the interests of the local elite, served as the umbrella organization and “sponsor” for the cooperative. This act of cooperation was symbolic of a move toward rural elite integration. It showed a degree of deference on the part of the recently arrived farmers toward the local elite and showed a sense of acceptance and shared struggle on the part of the local elite toward the farmers. The local elite joined the farmers’ struggle as they faced the prospect of economic uncertainty in the grain markets and angry confrontations with environmentalists. This act of alliance was a significant marker in a series of processes, but served as a key point of reference to understand the changes I observed in the rural elite in Santarém. This

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transformation is not due to conditions changing among the ranchers or among the farmers alone. It is primarily due to the position of both groups in relation to the conflict over the future of the Amazon. This conflict involves smallholders, local communities, Brazilian nongovernment organizations, policy makers at various levels of government, and importantly, two types of actors who represent globalizing influences on the Amazon—agribusiness and environmentalists. The expansion of mechanized agriculture in the Amazon can be seen as the most recent manifestation of two processes. The first is the northward expansion of soybeans in Brazil; the second is the changing nature of economic relations in the Amazon. In the next two chapters, I provide the theoretical and historical backgrounds for understanding the expansion of soybeans from southern Brazil into the Amazon (Chapter 2) and for the emergence of a mechanized agriculture economy in the Amazon (Chapter 3). After a discussion of research methods and the specific challenges of conducting ethnographic research with landed elites in the Brazilian Amazon (Chapter 4), I detail the process of migration and establishing a farm, with particular attention to the way economic goals and identity intersect among Gaúcho farmers arriving in Santarém (Chapter 5). Then I describe the reaction of the local elite to the arrival of soybeans in the Amazon, including an analysis of how their perception of risk and cultural model of the economy lead to a particular way of diversifying economic activity through their extended families (Chapter 6). I conclude with an analysis of the implications of these social processes on the debate about the economic and ecological future of the region (Chapter 7).

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Chapter 2 Soybean Expansion in Brazil: Political Economy and Agricultural Economics

This dissertation is centered on the arrival of soybean agriculture in the Brazilian Amazon, specifically in Santarém, but the arrival of soybeans in the North is only the most recent part of an expansion of mechanized agriculture in Brazil. The development of the mechanized agricultural economy in the South and its continued expansion northward preceded the arrival of Gaúchos and mechanized agriculture in the Amazon and many of the consequences of their arrival were conditioned by that earlier history (Figure 2.1). During the peak 25 years of expansion in the United States (1940–1965), the soybean output grew from 2 to 19 million metric tons. From 1970 to 1995, soybean production in Brazil increased from less than 1.5 million to 26 million metric tons (Figure 2.2). The Brazilian soybean boom during the 1970s was dramatic, and the relative scale of this growth is sometimes difficult to appreciate. “The uniqueness of the industry’s expansion is perhaps best expressed as of a global perspective: in this century, in a similar time period, no other internationally traded commodity of any country has had output expansion equal to that of Brazilian soybeans” (Warnken 1999, p. 9).

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Source: Warnken 1999, p. 23 Figure 2.1. Production regions of Brazil.

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Source: Data from IPEA/IBGE Figure 2.2. Soybean production in Brazil, 1960–2006.

While there is a rumor that American university agronomists were the ones to introduce soybeans to Brazil in the 1960s, soybeans had been grown for decades before U.S. university development programs started (Warnken 1999, p. 9). Although soybeans were not reported in São Paulo’s official agricultural statistics until 1945, there is some evidence of Brazilian soybean plantings dating back to the 19th century and certainly evidence of their planting by Japanese immigrant farmers after 1908 (Warnken 1999). Soybeans first began to be cultivated in large quantities after 1947, when the first exports to Europe began (Conceição 1984). This production took place primarily in Rio Grande do Sul, specifically in three “microregions”: Colonial de Santa Rosa with 78% of the state’s production in 1950, Colonial das Missões with 13% of 1950 production, and Colonial de Ijuí with 3% (Conceição 1984). Soybeans were not an important crop in São Paulo and Paraná 24

until the 1950s following coffee freezes in 1953 and 1955 (Warnken 1999). The size of the soy plantings in Rio Grande do Sul were small as the crop was initially used synergistically, meaning that soybeans were double cropped with wheat, using the same equipment and used as an input in other farm activities, such as hog farming. Brazil’s soybean production began in Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, where farmers used the crop as forage, green manure, and hog feed. Farmers shifted to production for the market when industrial processors of cotton seed, peanuts, and castor beans began purchasing soybeans to crush for cooking oil. (Warnken 1999, p. 26) The initial soybean region was concentrated in Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná (Warnken 1999). Philip Warnken (1999) notes that the institutional and physical infrastructures for soybean production, including the agricultural input and output industries, were superior in these two states compared to other states, noting especially their advantages relative to the State of São Paulo. São Paulo produced coffee, which was an important export during this period, and remained tied to that economy as soybean production expanded in the South. The Brazilian agricultural system was dominated by export crops, but did not include soybeans in any real quantities until after 1963. “Of the twelve most important crops in 1959, four (coffee, cotton, sugarcane and cocoa) were important export crops” (Schuh 1970, p. 103). This export-oriented agriculture involved a rise in technology used for farming specifically, an increase in the number of tractors. “Between 1950 and 1960 there was a sharp increase in the number of tractors and a more modest increase in the number 25

of plows. The total number of tractors increased from about 8,400 in 1950 to 63,500 in 1960” (Schuh 1970, p. 154). Almost all of them were added to farms in the Southern region (Schuh 1970). The production of wheat exceeded soy at this time (1960s), but credit policies that promoted the purchase of tractors and combines for the production of wheat had an added effect of boosting the investment in soy (and set the stage for the boom period that followed), because, as noted earlier, the same equipment could be used for soy production (Conceição 1984). For Foweraker (1981), the emergence of soy in the South meant the arrival of capitalist relations in rural Brazil. Areas that were already fully capitalist exert an influence over frontier regions, incorporating them into the economic structures already in place. Foweraker sees capitalist relations developing in the Brazilian countryside in three stages. First, extractive industries expand out from the periphery of the settled area. During this first stage, “[t]he social relations of production in the region are mainly servile, and manifest all the signs of a direct coercion of labor. But there also exists an emerging petty commodity sector, and the significant historical result of this stage is the incipient peasant class which begins to occupy the region” (Foweraker 1981, p. 28). As roadways expand and settlement is encouraged, the social relations of production during the next, intermediate stage are typified by “the petty commodity sector, or ‘mixed’ forms of servile and capitalist relations. Servile relations are residual or reproduced anew; the payment of wages is not always accompanied by free movement of labour and does not always exclude forms of extra-economic coercion” (Foweraker 1981, p. 32). According to Foweraker, the process of frontier occupation reaches its conclusion in the third stage, when the social relations are fully capitalist. “Economic activity is no longer predominantly extractive but agricultural, 26

and agricultural production itself tends to become increasingly capitalized. Concurrently, there is a rapid increase in the price of land, and the pattern of land tenure within the region becomes increasingly concentrated” (Foweraker 1981, p. 37). The model Foweraker describes is a good fit for the development of agriculture in the South. The social relations and land-use practices of soybean agriculture in this region correspond well to the final stage in Foweraker’s theory. “Rapid population growth, easier access to the national economy, and increasing commercial production of agricultural goods are related to developments of the third stage of frontier expansion” (Foweraker 1981, p. 47). The traits that define the economic conditions of soybean expansion in the South are the same ones that Foweraker names as typical of the third stage of frontier occupation, when capitalist relations dominate, namely commercial agricultural production, a rise in land prices, concentrated landholdings, and the emergence of a “free” labor market (Foweraker 1981).

The Expansion of Soybean Production Is Shaped by Government Policy, Changes in the Global Food System, and Rising Internal Demand If soybean production in the Brazilian South typifies the arrival of capitalist social relations in rural Brazil, the expansion of soybean production out of that region after 1970 can also be seen as an expansion of capitalist relations. However, the geographic pattern and the uneven nature of the expansion can be understood better through reference to the agricultural economics and economic geography literature, as the frontier formation

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process documented by Foweraker (1981) does not consistently account for the observed pattern. Up until 1970, 96% of Brazil’s soybean crop was produced in the four states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, and São Paulo a region Warnken calls the “traditional soybean production region” (Warnken 1999; see Figure 2.1). A tremendous expansion in soybean production in Brazil took place between 1970 and 1980, when production climbed from 1.5 million metric tons to 15.2 million metric tons (Warnken 1999). During this early phase much of the increase took place in the traditional soybean production region, due to yield increases and area expansion, but the land available for soybean expansion had reached its limit by 1980, as the area of production was virtually the same in this region between 1980 and 1996 (Warnken 1999). At this point, the expansion of soybeans began in earnest in the cerrado region of Brazil. Figure 2.3 shows the dramatic expansion of soybean production during the 1970s in Brazil. While Foweraker (1981) explains that soybean production is simply a result of the incorporation of the frontier into capitalist relations of production, it is not a satisfactory explanation for this rapid growth. Beyond the geographic expansion of capitalism, what accounts for such a large jump in production? The 1973 embargo on soybean and soybean meal exports by the United States would seem to be an obvious change in the global market for soybeans and suggests that Brazilian soybeans expanded to capture the vacuum created when America removed itself from the global market. The United States’ embargo was due to concerns about the rising price of soybeans and soybean-derived products (especially as an ingredient for animal feed) in the domestic market. (Lundborg 1987). “The embargo is

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considered to have had negative effects on [American] farmers since it called into question the reliability of the US as a supplier” (Lundborg 1987, p. 30). The American embargo was seen to have “propelled Brazil into the world soybean market” (McVey and Wisner 2000). As a result of the embargo and other economic conditions, the price for soybeans “increased from the $3.10 to $3.40 range (per bushel) during the 1972 harvest period to over $10.00 in June 1973. Price increases for soyabean meal were even larger” (Faminow and Hillman 1986, p. 352). The price rose and production in Brazil rose at the same time, providing an obvious explanation for the expansion of Brazilian soybeans, namely a rational response to an external market price signal.

Source: Based on data from IPEA/IBGE Figure 2.3. Brazilian soybean production, 1960–1980.

There are a number of problems with this explanation, however, among them the fact that the timing for Brazilian harvest could not possibly have allowed the Brazilian crop to 29

directly substitute for U.S. soybeans during the very brief embargo (Leclercq 1989). Warnken (1999) agrees that the embargo and the price signal created by the embargo do not explain the expansion of soybeans. In fact, soybeans have continued to expand in Brazil, despite a downward trend in price from 1973 to 1999, although supplies have increased faster than price has declined, demonstrating demand growth (Faminow and Hillman 1986). Instead, Warnken suggests that the embargo contributed to a larger set of political and climate events during the period 1971–1973, which he suggests commingled in a way that is difficult to untangle (Warnken 1999). The events begin with the 1971 decision by the American government to devalue the dollar relative to other currencies, to stimulate demand for U.S. commodities worldwide. In 1972, the Soviet Union purchased a large part of the U.S. grain crop. In 1973, the anchovy harvest off the Peruvian coast failed due primarily to changes in ocean temperature we now know to be associated with El Niño. This was the primary protein source for feed (especially poultry and pork). In 1973, the peanut crop in central Africa failed due to a drought that has since been attributed to El Niño–related climate patterns. Soybean meal became a substitute for peanut cake in animal feed. In June 1973, the U.S. government issued an export embargo on soybean and soybean meal exports to try to dampen rising feed and meat prices (Destler 1980). After the 1972 American ban on soybean exports, followed by the 1973 reversal of this policy, Japan and Western Europe sought alternative sources for protein, in order to be better prepared if America repeated this policy. Merle Faminow and Jimmye Hillman (1986, p. 351) suggest that the external economic factors may not have been as important as internal Brazilian economic and policy concerns: “A complex array of institutional, social, political and economic forces has shaped the 30

development of Brazil’s soyabean industry, which was well under way by the time of the embargo.” Instead of export-oriented growth, they highlight a growing domestic demand for soybean oil and meal for feed, to supply the growing domestic market for poultry and eggs, and government support for maintaining a strong domestic food supply to produce downward pressure on food prices in the growing urban areas (Faminow and Hillman 1986). This was combined with policies driven by domestic concerns related to support for the Brazilian currency (the Cruzeiro at the time) and a massive expansion of farm credit (Faminow and Hillman 1986). The brief period in which there was a decline in the level of trust in American-sourced soybean meal by Europeans and Japanese importers was a missed opportunity for Brazil, as Brazilian supplies were even less reliable during this period (Faminow and Hillman 1986). In combination, these elements explain the increased production better than the notion that Brazilian soybeans replaced American soybeans when the American government banned exports. Warnken (1999, p. 10) suggests that among the causes of soybean expansion, Brazilian national policy is dominant: “The soybean industry was designated and treated as a special industry. It was protected, subsidized and stimulated. Tens of billions of dollars were transferred from the national treasury to the industry.” The policies included credit for the purchase of equipment and supplies, high export taxes, and complicated regulations intended to discourage export (Warnken 1999). These policies were driven by concerns with foreign exchange earnings and the Brazilian national debt, in particular a desire to reduce the importation of cooking oil and animal feed (Warnken 1999). The government wanted to keep food prices low because of fears

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about the consequences of large numbers of impoverished citizens arriving in the cities at this time (Warnken 1999). Low-cost food was seen as a way to diminish the risk of unrest and resistance to the national government among the urban poor. If the government were interested in seeing mechanized agriculture move into the Central West to establish a more reliable (read: capitalist) population in that part of the Brazilian territory, then the early 1970’s expansion of soybeans was a poor policy outcome. In 1975, Rio Grande do Sul and Paraná produced more than 80% of Brazil’s total soybean harvest (Faminow and Hillman 1986). Because the growth in soybeans from the South and Southeast was drawn from crop substitution and productivity increases, that region had a limited potential for growth. By the mid 1970s the area of soybean cultivation in the South had reached its limit and farmers sought new places to expand. The industry only expanded northward into the Central West once this limit was reached. Between 1975 and 1980, nearly all of the growth occurred in Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Goias, and Mato Grosso do Sul (Faminow and Hillman 1986). This growth showed a different pattern from the previous expansion

Expansion into the Central West The story of soybean expansion in Brazil is in many ways the story of the development of agriculture in the Central West and it differs in important ways from the development of agriculture in the South. First, let me clarify the geographic terms I will be using in this section. The original state of Mato Grosso was divided into two states in 1977, Mato Grosso

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to the north and Mato Grosso do Sul to the south. I will use the term “original Mato Grosso” to refer to the pre-1977 state, which included both modern states. The development of agriculture in the Central West is different from the growth of soybean agriculture in the South. Low-density cattle ranching drove the first wave of agricultural expansion in the Central West. “About one-half of the increase in total farm land … during the 1950’s … occurred in the sparsely settled Central West region and in the territories of the North” (Schuh 1970, p. 133). Prior to 1970, original Mato Grosso was very sparsely populated with a production system based on subsistence agriculture, low-density cattle grazing on the grasslands and small clearings in the gallery or deciduous forests for annual crops (Ratter et al. 1997). There was also a regional market for materials derived from the native vegetation (lumber and construction materials, fruits, charcoal, etc.) (Ratter et al. 1997). Cattle ranching remained dominant in Mato Grosso do Sul even after mechanized agriculture became a leading economic activity in the Central West. This is due in part to the more intense dry season in Mato Grosso do Sul, compared to Mato Grosso. Some of the soybean farmers I interviewed had made an attempt to grow soybeans in Mato Grosso do Sul and reported that their yields were sometimes very low because of the intense dry season and occasional droughts. They suggested that growing soybeans is possible in this region but carries a higher risk of failure than in Mato Grosso, the South or the Amazon. In the mid-1970s mechanized agriculture expanded rapidly into original Mato Grosso. The farmers who settled there were heavily capitalized from the beginning. Whereas agricultural development in the South closely followed Foweraker’s model (1981), the

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development of the agricultural frontier in Mato Grosso differed from Foweraker’s projections in two main ways. The Brazilian government made direct investments in this industry and the settlers formed cooperatives, both of which dramatically reduced the risks involved in developing a new agricultural frontier and reduced the level of conflict, as the arriving soybean farmers had a clear advantage in their land titling and land-use choices.

Economic Incentives Because farmers have been unable to procure clear titles to their land in settlement frontiers in Brazil, conditions favored social conflict and removed incentives for responsible land use practices (Alston et al. 1999). In the Central West, private colonization projects were able to change the land title process, making land titling less uncertain and reducing the transaction costs and economic risks of buying land (Jepson 2006a). This reduced the degree of social conflict, although it did not necessarily make the frontier development process more equitable, as there were obvious advantages to those who were able to receive the support of these cooperatives in comparison to those who were acting alone. Contrary to Foweraker’s theory of frontier expansion, the frontier in Mato Grosso was fully capitalist from its inception (Jepson 2006b). This was because credit and other support was available to the farmers through government programs. With access to credit and good terms for the purchase of equipment, the arriving farmers planted maize, rice and soybeans (Ratter et al. 1997). The change in production brought about by the settlement of the frontier with mechanized agriculture was dramatic. “In 1976 [original] Mato Grosso did not 34

cultivate soybeans, but in 2005 the state planted 25% (5.15 million hectares) of the national soybean crop” (USDA 2005, p. 23, cited in Jepson 2006a). Virtually all of the growth in soybean production since 1980 has come from the Central West (Warnken 1999). This growth in agricultural production was accompanied by population growth related to the new economic opportunities. From 1970 to 1991, population in the Central West nearly doubled (IBGE). “Land in the cerrados1 could be purchased for one-third or less than the price for land in the south, and in one of the nation’s most extraordinary human migrations in recent times, hundreds of thousands of farmers left the south to resettle in the cerrados” (Warnken 1999, p. 30). The agricultural growth and resulting rise in economic activity attracted other migrants from outside the region, many of whom hoped to find work on the farms or in the various sectors affected by the increased economic activity driven by farming. Due to the low labor demand in mechanized agriculture, the agricultural output and land under cultivation grew much faster than employment (Klink and Moreira 2002). This, in combination with the urban migration of former landowners and others who lived in the area of expanding mechanized agriculture, led to low population densities in the agricultural areas and urbanization in the larger cities.

1

The “cerrados” is a savanna region in central South America, consisting of vegetation ranging from dense grassland to patches of gallery forest (Ratter et al. 1997). 35

Brazilian Concerns about Territory Transportation was initially a serious limitation to the growth of the soybean industry in the Central West. Rail transportation was long planned and long delayed. After 1945, as planning and then construction of Brazília began, roads replaced rail as the main transportation linkage to the Southeast, where the infrastructure for processing and exporting agricultural commodities was concentrated (Lucarelli et al. 1989 cited in Klink and Moreira 2002). Road transportation is more expensive than rail or river transportation. “Cerrado soy producers currently pay much higher transport costs than their major competitors in the international markets, the United States and Argentina” (Klink and Machado 2005, p. 711). While the poor infrastructure is a competitive disadvantage in relation to other soybean producing areas, it also served as an initial incentive to the expansion of soybeans relative to other crops. Because soybeans require less nitrogen fertilizer than other crops, producing soybeans entails lower relative costs when factoring in the cost of transporting fertilizer from the Southeast (Klink and Machado 2005). Concerns about territorial occupation also provided an incentive to national policies supporting soybean expansion. The Brazilian government was interested in supporting the settlement of the Central West by farmers from the South using industrial methods as a way to increase the area of Brazil that was populated with the “right kind” of people. The previous occupants of the region were thought to be wasting the resources that were present with low productivity. “Along the last 30 years, as the leading crop of Brazilian agriculture, soybean commanded the implementation of a new civilization in Midwest

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Brazil, carrying the progress and the development to the Cerrados, thought to be wastelands before soybean development took over the area.” (Dall’Agnol 2005, p.4) Policymakers operated with the understanding that arriving farmers were allied with the interests of the urban elite and less likely to be tempted by communism. Because of their strong sense of allegiance to Brazil, they could provide a bulwark against the influence of communists and the threat of territory loss. Implicit in this fear is the lack of trust in the earlier settlers and native Brazilians already living in that region.

“Gaúchos” The farmers that were viewed favorably by the Brazilian Government as colonists in the Central West are known as “Gaúchos”. Gaúcho was a term shared by the ranchers and horsemen of Argentina. The Spanish word Gaucho is pronounced with an emphasis on the a, while the Portuguese word is pronounced with an emphasis on the u. Early uses of the term Gaúcho in Brazil were pejorative and signified a vagabond and/or cattle thief operating in the Companha region of Rio Grande do Sul (Meyer 1957). There are a number of material items associated with this identity, including baggy pants called bambacha and the Chimarrão (a device for drinking yerba maté an unsweetened herbal tea from the region), but the strongest association is with the image of a man on horseback. José de Alencar (1978) called the Gaúcho the “centaur of the pampas”, due to the strong association with ranching and horsemanship. The term Gaúcho shifted from the ranching areas and horsemen to signify the residents of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Ruben Oliven (2006) marks the Farroupilha Revolution of 37

1835 to 1845 as the key transformative element in shifting the term into a statewide identity and also shifting the connotation to a more positive association with independence of spirit, bravery and a masculine determination to overcome adversity. The residents of Rio Grande do Sul included German and Italian immigrants (beginning in 1824 and 1875, respectively). These immigrant groups were assimilated as Gaúchos after World War II, in a conscious effort by members of Gaúcho traditionalist movements organized into “Centers for Gaúcho Traditions” (CTG) and as a consequence of various nationalist agendas within Brazil from the 1930s through the period of military governments (Oliven 2000). Part of the appeal for these immigrant groups was the ability to shed the negative association with their previous identity as colonos a term that signified “someone who lacked certain attributes that were considered positive. Colono came to represent the notion of a person who lacked ambition, social tact, elegance, posture, social behavior, a sense of opportunity and progress, boldness, perspicacity and sagacity” (Teixeira 1988, p. 54). Becoming identified with the bold, independent and brave connotations of a Gaúcho was an improvement in the context of regional Brazilian identities. Rio Grande do Sul was one of the first states in Brazil to embrace mechanized agricultural techniques. The association of farmers from Rio Grande do Sul with the mechanized agricultural economy, has led to the term Gaúcho sometimes signifying any large-scale farmer for those living in the Central-West and North. Oliven (2000) notes how the potential to expand landholdings in new frontiers carried additional prestige and solidified the migrant farmers’ sense of Gaúcho identity. “When they left Rio Grande do Sul, where they were, at the most small landowners with only a few acres of land, and acquired much greater areas of land on the agricultural frontiers of Brazil, they symbolically ceased to be 38

small colonists and were transformed into great landowners, that is, Gaúchos” (Oliven 2000, p. 142). Because the residents of the Central West and the North were not sensitive to differences within Brazilians from the South, the term Gaúcho was used to refer to farmers from the states of Santa Catarina and Paraná, even though the correct term in Brazil for someone from Santa Caterina is Santa Catarinense, and Paranaense should be used for someone from Parana. Some Santerenos refer to any white Brazilian from outside the Amazon as a Gaúcho, especially if they are involved in agriculture, because of the strong pattern of farmers immigrating from the South recently, and the notion that Gaúchos are the vanguard of this migration pattern.

Agronomy Another important element in the expansion of soybeans into the Cerrados was the development of new types of soybeans adapted to the conditions found in the Central West. Soybean varieties used in the Midwest of North America and in southern Brazil cannot be used in the Cerrados, so the development of new versions by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária - Embrapa) was essential (Warnken 1999). Once varieties of soybeans were developed that could thrive under the more intense heat and lower latitude, the next obstacle was related to the nature of the soils found in the Cerrados. “Despite being chemically poor, the soils have very good physical characteristics, flat topography and good rainfall distribution during the soybean growing season.” (Dall’Agnol 2005, p. 2) The Latosols found in this region have a low pH and availability of calcium and magnesium, and high aluminum content (Lopes and Cox 39

1977a, cited in Ratter et al. 1997). The soil is easily corrected with an application of lime and this technique was used successfully in the Cerrados. Ratter et al. describe the process: “before cultivation can take place a heavy application of lime and fertilizer is necessary to counteract soil acidity and to neutralize aluminum, which is present at toxic levels for virtually all cultivated crops” (1997, p.228). Beyond the work of Embrapa, and the development of a successful soil correction technique, there were several policies of the Brazilian national government that led to the dominance of soybean agriculture in the Central West. These include subsidized credit, twenty percent of which was used for soybean production in the Central West (Klink and Moreira 2002). The Polocentro project was intended to boost the development of the agricultural sector in the Central West during the late 70s and 1980’s. Medium and largescale farmers were the primary beneficiaries. Farms larger than 1000 hectares used 60% of the funds and only 12% of the funds were used on farms 200 hectares or smaller (Klink and Moreira 2002). This policy had an effect of increasing the economies of scale for soybean farmers. When the World Bank and IMF put pressure on Brazil in the 1980s to reduce subsidized credit the costs for farmers rose briefly before the government adjusted by offering better price support for soybeans, rice and corn (Klink and Moreira 2002). The economic conditions in the 1990’s favored the continuation of soybean expansion, as the price of soybeans and soy products continued to be strong, the Brazilian Real was devalued and productivity gains were made (Klink and Moreira 2002). By this point the state-led development plans had given the industry the “push” needed to gain enough momentum. The expanding international market for soybeans then created conditions that

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favored the continued growth of this economy. In this way the struggle for land, as Foweraker describes it, was won by international capital. This process didn’t follow Foweraker’s projected path in the Central West, however, as much of the intermediate processes he describes were “skipped” by the heavy investment in mechanized agriculture by state-led agricultural investment and the involvement of private colonization schemes. The Amazon presents yet another model of “the struggle for land” when the soybean frontier expands in Brazil. The pattern of economic and land use changes in the Amazon however are driven by a clash between a production system based on heavy investment and high levels of production and the economic conditions that prevailed in the Amazon, which favored low-density land uses and economic diversification. While Foweraker’s theory was based, in part, on the settlement of the Amazon (more specifically, southern Pará), the arrival of soybean farmers in Santarém disrupts the process, as Foweraker’s model would describe it. The various interests, social relationships and established economic conditions already in place meant that the soybean expansion had to adapt to the conditions of the Amazon, while at the same time the people of the Amazon were adapting to the arrival of mechanized agriculture. But in order to understand those adaptations, it is necessary to understand the historical trajectory of economic development in the Amazon.

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Chapter 3 Debating the Future of the Amazon

The expansion of soybean production into the Amazon is a continuation of the expansion of mechanized agriculture in Brazil, which began in the South before moving into the Central West, (a process I described in Chapter 2). This chapter examines the ways in which this expansion is also a new stage in the human occupation of the Amazon, beginning with a review and summary of the ongoing debate about the future of the Amazon. These two approaches to the expansion of soybean agriculture are meant to be complementary rather than exclusive. The debate about the Amazon has its roots in the colonial encounter between native Brazilians and Europeans, followed by the internal development plans of Brazil, and, later, the various boom-and-bust cycles typical of an extractive economy. Academic studies of the region have gone through distinct phases as well, with initial efforts focused on the role of ecological conditions as limiting factors and recent work concentrating on Political Ecology and land-use change. In this chapter I review how perceptions of the Amazon have shifted through various phases. The overly optimistic and pessimistic assessments of the region’s potential, which characterized the colonial encounter and fueled the boom-and-bust cycles, were brought to focus on the ecological features in the 1970s. During the initial attempt to expand sugar cultivation in the Amazon, and during the Rubber Boom, the qualities of nature (primarily the density of vegetation and expanse of forested areas) were seen as either harboring 42

outrageous potential or presenting insurmountable obstacles. Later, attempts to understand the environmental conditions brought a more scientific approach to the question of the potential of the environment to support development. The field of Political Ecology reacted against the focus on environmental conditions in the Amazon as the primary factor in explaining development with a renewed focus on the political and social context of settlement in the region. At the same time, concerns about deforestation and its causes led to empirical studies of the land-use and land-cover changes in the region. For questions related to the arrival of soybean agriculture and a new class of large-scale landowner in the Amazon, a Political Ecology framework would seem to be well suited to understanding events that are heavily shaped by the political, economi,c and social context. In order to understand the heated debate about the future of the Amazon, we must first understand how ideas about the Amazon evolved. In the next several sections, I describe the evolution of the frameworks used to understand the Amazon, its people, and its needs from the perspectives of developers and researchers.

The Amazon as Paradise/The Amazon as a Green Hell A long-standing tenet of linguistic anthropology is that the frames of reference in a debate will shape the views of the participants in that debate (Tannen and Wallat 1987; Lakoff 2004). Candace Slater’s work builds on the important insights of Raymond Williams (1972), that “nature” is contingent and culturally constructed. She opens Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon by describing her reaction to an IMAX movie about the Amazon: “My problem with the IMAX movie was not just that it was simplistic. It also was that the 43

movie’s presentation of exotic plants and animals together with a select group of ‘natural’ people encouraged outsiders to follow a long tradition of seeing the Amazon as a realm of nature that it was their mission or their right—and not the mission or right of Amazonians—to protect. And this protection, no matter how well intentioned, was a form of outside control, and therefore suspect” (Slater 2002, pp. 3–4). Outside control is predicated on a twofold idea about the Amazon that is held by outsiders, in contrast to Amazonians, that the Amazon is a paradise on one hand and a dangerous wilderness on the other. Early images of the Amazon were colored by the legend of El Dorado, the city of gold, so wealthy that the king would wake each morning to coat himself in fresh gold dust, only to wash it off in the evening. The shift from early visions of the Amazon as an endless source of gold to a pristine and untouched natural paradise came about through the writings of Henry Walter Bates. His fascination with the plant and animal life of the region combined with the vocabulary of romanticism and ethnocentrism installed the Amazon as a second Eden (Slater 2002). Hugh Raffles shows that the views of Bates and another early explorer, Alfred Russell Wallace, were driven by an understanding of the region as being endowed with amazing potential wasted by lazy natives. “For both men, the Amazon is a site of almost unlimited productive potential. Foreshadowing the blithely optimistic rhetoric deployed by the developmentalist Brazilian state of the 1970s, the perceived inability of the natives to rise out of their slothful condition is – with a depressing insouciance – contrasted with the possibilities that limitless fertility offers to farmers of a different stock” (Raffles 1999, p. 364). The awe and inspiration of this Edenic vision contrasts with Theadore Roosevelt’s later description of an untamed and hostile wilderness that was dangerous and 44

primordial (Roosevelt 1914). These two poles of awe for the natural splendor and repulsion from the dangerous wilderness continue to dominate later visions of the Amazon. When explorers first encountered the native Amazonian populations, the Amazon floodplains were occupied by as many as 15 million people (Slater 2002). One of the most important settlement areas was located near Santarém at the junction of the Amazon and Tapajós Rivers. Reporting on his 1542 expedition, Francisco Orellana described encountering a flotilla of two hundred canoes with twenty to thirty warriors each, near Santarém, suggesting the local indigenous population (The Tapajó) exceeded 40,000 (Smith 1999). While some have discounted the explorers’ tales, Nigel Smith replies that “in the case of the Tapajó village, now the site of Santarém, we have more than early eyewitness accounts. The main village of the Tapajó extended for several kilometers, as evidenced by anthropogenic black earth covering substantial parts of the older districts of Santarém” (Smith 1999, p. 23). I will explore the specific ways that the early boom-and-bust cycles allowed large-scale landowners to build and consolidate their social position in more detail in Chapter 5, but their economic strategies shared the colonial view of the Amazon as a bountiful, but dangerous environment. Although early explorers were seeking gold, the first extractive economy was based on cacao, which was processed to make chocolate (Slater 2002). Cacao and complementary products, including cinnamon and vanilla, were hauled from the region during the 18th century and into the early 19th century (Dean 1987). The cacao was grown in plantations worked by African slaves and captured Indians. “One Royal cacao grove on the right bank of the Amazon a little upstream from Santarém contained some 40.000 cacao

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trees in the middle of the eighteenth century” (Smith 1999, p. 37). Following Charles Goodyear’s discovery of the process of vulcanization in 1839, the economic returns for the cacao plantations began to fade, as the Rubber Boom took hold of the region (Slater 2002). The rubber economy operated under a labor system called aviamento. The men who gathered the rubber were provided with goods and materials on credit from rubber dealers. “The tappers, accepting these advances, were also granted the ‘right’ to tap in the groves of the intermediary, whom they now recognized as their patrão, or patron, on condition that they deliver all their rubber to him and buy all their supplies from him” (Dean 1987, p. 39). The price paid to the tapper for the rubber he had collected was often less than the price of the materials provided by the patron, so the tapper would remain, in effect, trapped in service to that patron. The use of this system in place of a plantation system that would have allowed for the concentration of production was driven by several factors, among them, the low capital availability in the Amazon among the merchant class, low labor availability, and concerns that the environmental conditions would impede largescale plantings. During the first decade of the 20th century some Brazilian officials expressed skepticism that rubber could produce comparable quantities in the Amazon that it was producing in the plantations in Malaya (Dean 1987). The same debt/collection process was also used in the jute economy, which expanded and was lucrative during the middle years of the 20th century. In this instance, however, a crop imported from Asia was seen to be able to be planted reliably in high concentration and with a high productivity in the floodplain region. By the 1980s, synthetic fibers and the shift to bulk handling of global commodities brought about the collapse of jute production

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(Winkler-Prins 2006). The jute factories in the Amazon are shuttered and abandoned today. The focus on the Amazon as a region with natural conditions that either provide a bountiful economic base or are capable of a disastrous collapse will find echoes in the various academic approaches to understanding the Amazonian people and their environmental context from the 1970s to the present.

Early Academic Studies: Adaptations to Biophysical Environmental Conditions The question of the productivity of the Amazon and its ability to support a population was an early point of debate in the academic study of the Amazon, which could be seen as a reflection of the opposing initial views of the Amazon from early explorers and those who sought their riches in the region. Brazilians seeking to expand the economic productivity of the Amazon and others promoting economic development in the region saw the Amazon as a potentially vibrant, productive area that was simply poorly managed by Amazonians. “This view has served to justify efforts at occupying the Amazon with outsiders, who were believed to be more capable than local inhabitants of using the presumed wealth therein – and in the process expropriated Indian lands, polluted the environment, and imposed external control on the region” (Moran 1993a, p. 142). Alternatively, the Amazon was also seen as a “counterfeit paradise,” in which small, isolated settlements practicing swidden agriculture were all that could be supported. Initial studies of the Amazon focused on the carrying capacity of the Amazon ecosystems (Meggers 1971). Human adaptations to the environment, however, allowed people to produce a living under difficult circumstances. Charles Wagley’s classic ethnography, Amazon Town (1953), 47

documented the way families used manioc gardens in combination with hunting, fishing and the collection of various food and medicinal resources to provide part of their food, and their engagement in paid labor to purchase additional supplies. In the early 1970s, Meggers drew on the emerging body of research showing the efficacy of slash-and-burn agriculture in the tropics, suggesting that the low population density and the need for long cycles in the swidden system support the conception of the Amazon as a region with limited agricultural potential. Swidden agriculture’s “ success in conserving the fertility of the soil carries with it a price, however, in the form of relatively low concentrations of population and permanency of residence” (Meggers 1971, p. 23). For a time, the debate about the carrying capacity of the Amazon centered on the availability of protein as a limiting factor in supporting indigenous populations in the Amazon. While some found evidence that the need for regular relocation and low settlement populations were driven, in part, by the need to improve hunting productivity in the face of declining yields (Gross 1975), others found that hunting yields were higher than expected (Vickers 1976). The attention on protein capture would explain the past human settlement limits, but others were more focused on characterizing the soils in thinking about the future of the region. Adaptation to biophysical conditions is certainly one of the more important aspects of farming strategies in the Amazon. The soils are variable, but low-quality agricultural soils cover large areas (Falesi 1972). The conditions favor abundant crop pests (insect biomass and biodiversity are signature ecological features of the Amazon region), the development and persistence of plant diseases (viral, bacterial, and fungal), and the local flora

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aggressively colonize areas cleared for crops. The rainfall arrives in intense bursts that can cause severe erosion, and there is a prolonged annual dry season (Moran et al. 2006). All of these biophysical conditions require adaptations, and the variety and ingenuity of these adaptations is remarkable (Moran 1976, 1993a; Moran et al. 2006). As I will discuss in the following chapter related to methodology, a thorough quantitative investigation of the farmers’ soil conditions, the corrections they made, and the cost of those corrections was not possible due to their concerns about allowing this information to pass into the hands of foreigners. This information was not seen as essential to understand the spread and success of industrial agriculture by the farmers, however, as the farmers I interviewed were consistently baffled by my questions about soil quality. They assured me repeatedly that all the problems are solved simply and cheaply with the help of modern methods. They explained that the soil is tested when they arrive, corrections are applied, and then the crops are planted. Through their explanations and on the basis of claims made by agronomists working for agricultural supply and consulting firms in the area, it is evident that the landowners are embedded more in an economic context for land-use decision making than in an ecological context for those decisions (Adams 2008). This is due to their ability to modify many of their local environmental conditions with investments in equipment, fertilizers, pest control agents, and various other inputs used in the modern mechanized agriculture that they practice (Adams 2008). As one agricultural technician working in Santarém explained to me, the soil is merely a matrix used to hold the plant and the inputs used to grow that plant. “The only real requirements are sun, rain, and flat ground.” Everything else can be purchased, including roads and vehicles for access to markets and inputs provided to the 49

plants. For large-scale mechanized agriculture, the physical conditions may not be essential to agricultural production in the Amazon, but the cost of their production is surely affected by the amount of correction, fertilization, and pest control that is needed. The thresholds of those costs relative to variable ecological conditions would be a useful follow-up study. However, unlike for small-scale farmers in the Amazon, economic adaptations rather than adaptations to the local ecological conditions are the primary determinants of the largescale farmer’s land-use strategy (Adams 2008). The large-scale farmers have not chosen to adapt their behavior to the local environmental conditions, but rather to create a set of environmental conditions that are well suited to their productive activities. William Balée (1998) suggests this is also true for indigenous people. While indigenous populations alter the ecosystem properties and secondary succession conditions by carefully managing the regrowth of cleared areas, capitalized farmers do this through modifying the soils with purchased inputs and applying pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and other applications of agrochemicals to combat the biophysical risks to their crops. In doing this, their land-use outcomes are shaped more strongly by their management techniques and access to credit than by the initial environmental conditions. These management techniques are more adequately understood through reference to theories explaining their economic standing, such as Political Ecology, than by the biophysical conditions of the land they are using.

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Political Ecology: The State and Elites Exploit the Environment and the Poor The large-scale landowners as social actors whose identity is shaped by their economic standing is a central element in much of the political economy literature on agriculture in the Amazon (Bunker 1988; Foweraker 1981; Porro 2005; Schmink and Wood 1992). Largescale landowners’ actions are explained as part of a historical development of an economic system articulating class interests expressed at the local level with an international system of exchange. From this perspective, historical context is important in explaining social relations and economic life in Amazônia. The powerful influence of global trade and the centuries-old history of European and later Brazilian interest and activity in the region are highlighted to help explain the nature of social relations and the causes of important events such as the extensive deforestation in the last 40 years. I provided a more general review of the Political Ecology literature in Chapter 1, but here I want to highlight the particular lineage of Political Ecology studies looking at the Amazon basin. This trend begins with studies that are not directly concerned with the Amazon, per se, but rather with the place of the frontier (represented by the Amazon) in a broader Political Economy of land occupation in Brazil, including Marxist scholars and Dependency Theorists (Foweraker 1981; Ianni 1979). A broad critique of the development policies, predicated on the negative impact these policies have on the smallholders, indigenous populations, and the environment (symbolized by the rate of deforestation) followed. The Political Ecology perspective varies, but there are a few important elements that Political Ecology studies analyzing the Amazon share. Farmers’ actions are explained as part of a historical development of an economic system articulating class interests and an 51

international system of exchange. In the Amazon, this takes the form of an alliance between a Brazilian state intent on modernizing and increasing production in the Amazon and largescale landowners trying to claim land. Below I will highlight three studies that have emphasized different elements of this common story (Bunker 1988; Hecht and Cockburn 1989; Schmink and Wood 1992). Stephen Bunker’s (1988) Underdeveloping the Amazon, using a World System Theory framework, follows on Moran’s Developing the Amazon but is explicit in opposing the underlying basis of the development goals for the region, as opposed to Moran’s more specific critique of the strategies and flawed understandings that resulted in negative outcomes for the region. Bunker’s key critiques focus on the nature of extractive economies in the Amazon. He argues these economies “have periodically enriched various dominant classes but progressively impoverished the entire region by disrupting both the Amazon Basin's ecology and human communities” (Bunker 1988, p. 3). Bunker highlights the role of the Brazilian state as an actor concerned not with the lives of Amazonians, but with a modernization project intended to secure increased production and revenue from (not for) the region. In this context, he argues that the competition among bureaucrats and widespread corruption led to the failure of colonization efforts. The results, in terms of land tenure are profoundly unequal, with small-scale colonists losing out to large-scale cattle schemes. Schmink and Wood (1992) focus on land conflict in southeastern Pará State. In their study area there are multiple conflicts including conflict related to government and private colonization schemes, gold mining, and encroachment into the territory of the Kayapó.

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Each conflict has a particular dynamic, but the overall picture is one of competing social actors with specific social class positions. These social groups and their “interests” were the central organizing feature of the analysis. “Our analysis of these changes was predicated on the idea that what we observed and documented in the field – for example, deforestation land use and settlement patterns, the rise and decline of different economic activities, and the assault on Indian rights – were net outcomes of a contest for resources between social groups capable of mobilizing varying forms of power” (Schmink and Wood 1992, p. 344). Apart from increased mobilization of gold miners, they show that the outcomes generally favored the Brazilian state and the landed elite (Schmink and Wood 1992). In terms of the control of land, Schmink and Wood emphasize the way that the large-scale landowners in the Amazon, through their solidarity with landowner politicians in Brasilia benefited from development plans, specifically through their ability to take advantage of credit, tax, and land-titling laws. While Bunker, Schmink, and Wood were focused on the nature of outcomes driven by Brazilian development goals, a more direct critique of landowners is found in Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn’s The Fate of the Forest (1989). They document the exploitative conditions embodied in the rubber economy. They document the Brazilian military’s desire to occupy the Amazon with large-scale landowners engaged in cattle ranching. By encouraging large-scale cattle ranching, the generals would address two great concerns: beef production and control of the northern territories (Hecht and Cockburn 1989). “[I]t suited their purposes to encourage the entrepreneurial and agro-industrial elites to embark on livestock production in the well-watered Amazon where vexatious dry seasons would not hamper animal growth and marketed beef supplies” (Hecht and 53

Cockburn 1989, p. 118). The large-scale landowners in this story are greedy and willing to do anything to build their wealth. “Amid the irruption in to the eastern Amazon, where Indians fled the advancing bulldozer or were driven from lands by guns, threats and the legal briefs of the fazendeiros, and where the caboclos watched giant rubber and Brazil-nut trees crash to the ground engulfed in flames, social tensions in the region became increasingly explosive” (Hecht and Cockburn 1989). The narratives presented by these three works are representative of the ways that largescale landowners have been characterized in the Amazon basin. In relation to Santarém, Nugent’s (1993) study is a more detailed analysis of the particular relations between these landowners and the victims of development (Caboclos, smallholders, etc.). He shows how the large-scale landowners in Santarém were able to expand their land holdings primarily through national government projects to expand the road infrastructure in the upland region south of Santarém. This description fits with the other Political Ecology approaches to understanding development practices in the Amazon which see a synergy between the Brazilian government’s development goals and increased economic standing for large landowners. However, Nugent provides enough ethnographic detail to begin to reveal the internal diversity of the local elite, an aspect of social relations that is invisible in most Political Ecology studies. Nugent notes that during the various boom-and-bust cycles, the local elite were not in a uniform position to purchase land during the short but pivotal moment when roads were being constructed in the upland region surrounding Santarém (Nugent 1993).

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While ranchers were among the chief villains of these Political Ecology studies, soy farmers are the new villains. Santarém is one of the key sites for recent studies of soybean expansion and the consequent rise in attention given to large-scale landowners (Fearnside 2001; Nepstad et al. 2006; Steward 2004, 2007; VanWey et al. 2007). A well-designed study of soybean expansion in that area was carried out by Corrina Steward (2004) just prior to the fieldwork period during which my study was carried out. Steward found that the expansion of soybeans into Santarém was made possible due to a particular model of the agro-environmental conditions of Santarém found in development programs and literature related to agro-industrial expansion. This paradigm reflected favorably upon agroindustrial development and negatively upon shifting cultivation practiced by the small- and medium-scale farmers of the region (Steward 2007). Steward refers to a series of documents and maps that circulated among farmers and policy makers documenting the availability of land that is well suited to industrial agriculture. The socio-economic and ecological landscape constructed by the state-made maps and institutions like Cargill and the local government provide a case for globalizing the region’s agricultural resources. In describing the local ecological landscape as best suited for mechanized agriculture, the maps naturalize the land’s comparative advantage for mechanized grain production over other economic activities. (Steward 2004, p. 17) Her study goes on to document a number of consequences of soybean expansion, including the disappearance of local communities, schools, and churches, as well as reports of violence and drinking water polluted by agricultural inputs (Steward 2007). She later 55

suggests that the smallholders and the non-government organizations acting on their behalf represent an alternative valuation of the landscape, one that emphasizes the diversity of local forests and smallholder farms and the sustainability of that diverse resource base (Steward 2007).

Land-Use and Land-Cover Change Studies While Political Ecology studies were criticizing the rising deforestation rate and land conflict in the Amazon, scholars began to take advantage of new technologies, such as Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), to better understand the specific causes of deforestation at various scales (McCracken et al. 1999; Moran and Brondízio 1998). These land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) studies took deforestation, not as an outcome of conflicts among interested groups, but as a process that could be studied empirically by combining ecological, geographic, and social data at various scales in a more precise way than a Political Ecology framework allowed. “Successful linking of conceptual models to these scales of analysis has been less common given the occasional tendency to use unclear units of analysis in estimating deforestation rates and a variety of spatial and temporal resolutions” (Brondízio et al. 2002, p. 134). Rather than suggest that in “the Amazon” a collection of vaguely defined social groups compete and the result is an unspecified amount of deforestation and land-use change, these studies sought to explain exactly why particular populations, with characteristics that could be generalized at particular scales depending on the nature of the data, would make decisions that result in specific, measurable quantities of deforestation. 56

The body of research examining LUCC in the Amazon includes some social or cultural variables. For instance, there is a pattern of land use associated with a common household strategy for occupying land. This pattern of high initial levels of deforestation, followed by a decline (Figure 3.1) is repeated as successive waves of settlers arrive (Brondízio et al. 2002). The impact of periodic or episodic events can amplify or retard the pattern, but the farms are established with roughly the same pattern of land use and forest clearing. Household lifecycles were shown to have a strong impact on land-use change (Moran et al. 2003; Moran et al. 2005), and culturally constructed “survival strategies” can be shown to have a profound effect on “landscape outcomes” (Browder 2002).

Source: Moran et al. 2005, p. 325 Figure 3.1. The colonist footprint.

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Recently, Leah VanWey, Álvaro D’Antona, and Eduardo Brondízio (2007) suggested that the pattern of rapid initial deforestation followed by a decline is associated more closely with factors related to the age of the farm lot, rather than factors related to household composition. In Santarém this is more obvious than in Altamira, where lot settlement and household histories are more closely aligned. However, the strength of this literature lies in explanations of land-use change in relation to property characteristics and choices made by individual property owners, who represent households. For instance transportation infrastructure, biophysical conditions, price signals and government policy have been shown to significantly influence land-use practices (Wood and Porro 2002). Guiding this approach is an intention to provide policy makers with clear data on the causes and driving forces behind deforestation in the Amazon. In this way, these studies address the debate about the future of the Amazon by validating the fact of rapid deforestation and reducing false claims about the causes of deforestation. “For example, small farmers are being increasingly blamed as the major agent of deforestation in the Amazon, despite the unsuitability of regional-based estimation to capture inter-annual deforestation at this level” (Brondízio et al. 2002, p. 134). In another article, researchers suggest that proportionally less area is deforested on smaller parcels of land, a finding that suggests larger-scale landowners may be leaving more of their land in reserve, even if they are responsible for more deforestation in the aggregate (VanWey et al. 2007). This may be related to the ability of larger-scale landowners to cycle their use of the land for longer periods, resulting in the achievement of an older regrowth, which shows up as forest, before it is put back into use. Within this field,

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however, large-scale landowners have proven to be more difficult to engage than smallholders using the survey-based methods that are commonly used for these studies. LUCC studies show farmers can adapt and household strategy is important, but large-scale landowners are not as well represented or understood, compared to small-scale farmers. Political Ecology is particularly well suited to the study of development efforts that feature large-scale landowners and explain both social inequality and deforestation. However, a Political Ecology approach sometimes over-emphasizes social class and does not accurately account for the cultural distinctions present within social classes. Therefore, a more accurate understanding of the distinctions within the social category of “large-scale landowner” is a necessary element in the debate about the future of the Brazilian Amazon, and I intend for my study to contribute to that understanding in order to inform both Political Ecology and LUCC studies of the Amazon. In this chapter I have shown that frameworks used in debating the future of the Amazon have shifted over time. The current conflict related to the expansion of soybeans is best understood when viewed in the context of these evolving frameworks. Early perceptions were exaggerated and grandiose. Slater (2002) has shown how the distinct cultured “frames” of Europeans and native Brazilians shaped two different perspectives on the future of the Amazon. The European view of the region as a vast underutilized expanse capable of generating great wealth underpinned later efforts by non-Amazonians to develop the region. In contrast, efforts to conserve the forest were fueled by the material generated by scholars studying the many local land uses and various relationships between the people living in the Amazon and their environmental context. This bifurcated view of

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the region is the context of the debate about its future and the advantages and disadvantages of soybean expansion into the Amazon.

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Chapter 4 Studying Large-Scale Landowners: Challenges, Ethical Dilemmas, and Methodology

In order to understand the changing social roles of large-scale landowners in Santarém, my study was designed to collect data in a variety of ways, including interviews with largescale landowners and people with whom they interacted, structured interviews using satellite data overlaid with a property grid, participant observation, and archival and library research. While using elements of various data collection strategies, this study is centered on an ethnographic treatment of large-scale landowners. Ethnography has been defined variously as a method, a theory, or both (Johnson 1998), but one of the essential aspects is direct and sustained contact with the study population within the context of their daily lives (O’Reilly 2005, p. 3). In simple terms, my study required access to large-scale landowners. This access was the greatest challenge in my fieldwork. I will address my efforts in this regard first, before turning to an itemized description of my methods. Doing an ethnography of elite landowners is made difficult by issues related to access. Shore (2004) suggests that elites are rarely studied because they resist being subjects of study. I found this to be true in the case of large-scale landowners in Santarém. Their resistance was multifaceted and quite effective. Ultimately, I was able to gain the

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trust of a few key landowners, and once that entry was made most of the other landowners were more open about their lives and goals.2 During previous fieldwork in the region, I had assisted with interviews in support of research being done by the Anthropological Center for Training and Research in Global Environmental Change (ACT) (see Adams 2008, D’Antona et al. 2008; Moran and Ostrom 2005; Moran et al. 2005; Moran et al. 2006). The vast majority of these interviews were conducted with small-scale farmers who lived on their rural properties where their homes were located and where they worked their land with family labor and limited technology (Moran et al. 2006). The interviewees were generally glad to have the attention and interest of researchers and were very welcoming of our arrival.

Challenges The large-scale farmers, by contrast, were rarely present on their farms. When I arrived at a large property, sometimes a property manager was there, but just as often there was no one to speak with. The managers who were present were reluctant to provide contact information or explain much about the operation of the farm or the owner’s relationship to the farm. If I had some information about the owner and was able to locate him or her at a

2

Pseudonyms are used throughout, as a gesture of good faith with landowners who shared information despite the negative images of large landowners in the region. Many of them would have proudly allowed their real names to be used, because they saw their activities and choices as legitimate and ethical. My use of pseudonyms is not meant as a negation of that position. I decided to be consistent throughout the dissertation. The cast of Mulheres Apaixionadas (a popular telenovela during my time in Brazil) was used to generate the names, in the order they were found and the names are not meant to connote any other significance. 62

place of business or residence in the city, then a secretary or family member served as a gatekeeper. The lack of access and repetitive nature of the conversations with gatekeepers who were suspicious of me made the large-scale landowners’ lack of trust in outsiders obvious. The institutionalized nature of the barriers also made it clear that the landowners regularly need to filter people’s access to them. The lack of trust by many large-scale landowners is understandable in this region, as government regulators, environmentalists, and popular opinion all characterize large-scale landowners as socially and environmentally irresponsible. The landowners, in turn, feel that they are unfairly targeted and inaccurately stereotyped in an internal political climate that equates large-scale landownership with an oppressive upper class and an external political climate that equates ranchers and farmers in the Amazon with the destruction of the Amazon rainforest (for examples, see Fearnside 2005; Greenpeace 2006a; Rohter 2003; Time Inc. 1989). In some cases, the feeling of being targeted is directly related to stated policies of the Brazilian federal government. The forest code as it applies in the Amazon region allows landowners to clear and use up to 20% of their properties (“Novo Código Florestal,” Law 4.771, September 15, 1965, modified to the current proportions of property by “Medida Provisória,” Law 2166-67, October 5, 1988). There are stiff fines and even jail sentences for violating this limit, although enforcement is spotty at best. The forested area must be four times larger than the area that the farmers and ranchers work to comply with the Brazilian constitution. This law is the chief legal tool of environmentalists, who seek to have the

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farmers who are using more than the legal limit face the legal consequences in the hopes of preventing further forest loss (Cleary 2006; Nepstad et al. 2006). Farmers are not interested in talking to outsiders and researchers about property boundaries because one of the great risks of clearing and working a portion of your property is that this section of your property will be judged to have an insufficient forest reserve. The perception among large-scale farmers is that foreigners who want to know about the area of their land will use this information, together with GPS and satellite images, to prove that they have cleared more than they are allowed, even though largescale landowners have been shown to clear a smaller percentage of their land area than small-scale landowners (VanWey et al. 2007). Another fear they expressed was that I would provide this information to the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, which is in charge of fines and penalties. In my experience, this expectation seems reasonable given the fact that foreign researchers, environmentalists, and Brazilian government officials live near one another, share many of the same social circles and a common non-Amazonian identity. One landowner expressed it this way, “You’re all either ‘Gringos’ or ‘Bringos.’” He explained that “Bringos” are Brazilians from the south who are visiting or working, often briefly, in the Amazon. One of the most common questions I was asked immediately after introducing myself was, “Which NGO do you work for?” Given this preconception, I chose to conduct interviews using satellite images only when the interview had been going well and there was an adequate level of trust, despite the advantages images can provide for the researcher (Liverman et al. 1998; Moran and Brondízio 1998; Moran and Ostrom 2005; Moran et al. 2001).

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Landowners control access to information through maintaining layers of preliminary contacts between themselves and people who want to meet with them. In order to set up an appointment to discuss their farming or economic activities it is necessary to call them, since they do not usually live on the farm. With a single exception, they were unwilling to schedule a meeting during this initial conversation. Typically, they asked if they could call me back. I quickly learned that they would not return my call, however, so I would offer to call them back at a better time. These difficulties were a serious concern for the viability of my research project during the first half of fieldwork. As Stephen Schensul et al. (1999, p. 77) note, “Because the length of the research period usually is limited by time and money, entry must proceed relatively smoothly and rapidly, building strong and appropriate relationships in a short period of time.” I was eventually able to contact the majority of landowners in the region (35 of the estimated 60 landowners with more than 1,000 hectares), and nearly all of the landowners I contacted were eventually willing to sit down with me for at least one extended interview. I visited a dozen times or more with some and with others I was only able to conduct a brief interview. I received only one flat rejection and was unable to meet with three other landowners I had contacted, due to time constraints and their busy travel schedules. While I initially worked to develop more access by building on contacts I had made in prior trips to the region and early in my fieldwork, it became clear that something more formal would be necessary. After consultation with one of my advisers, Eduardo Brondízio, I decided to give a presentation to The Santarém Rural Union (Sindicato Rural de Santarém) on my work. This organization represents landowners, in general, but the leadership has 65

been drawn from the large-scale landowners since many smaller-scale landowners feel that the Santarém Rural Workers Union (Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais de Santarém) better represents their interests. Most large-scale ranchers have been members and the most important landowning families have an influential role in the organization. By formally sharing my goals, methods, and some general sense of my positions on issues that are important to them, I could make myself appear less of a threat, while at the same time assume a more professional identity that made sense to a group of people who value professionalism. Presenting my work formally to a group they see as an important formal body representing their views also showed that I was aware of their leadership and was not gathering information in the region in a clandestine fashion.

Ethical Dilemmas: Which side am I on? A recent review of the field of applied anthropology (Rylko-Bauer et al. 2006) traces the origins of efforts to make anthropology more explicitly beneficial for the groups studied to the ideas of Sol Tax (1958, 1977). These included “participatory action” research, “community-based” research, and other examples of applied approaches, but they shared core components of collaborating in developing the research project and putting the research subjects’ welfare at the center of the project. “Many emphasized the centrality of advocacy in their work with disempowered or oppressed groups and communities or in work on behalf of those silenced by corporate, dictatorial, or military control of public communication venues” (Rylko-Bauer et al. 2006, p. 183). The applied approach grew out of a wider concern with the impact that anthropological research has on the subjects of 66

study, and this concern was made manifest in the changes to the professional codes of ethics, as well. Professional codes of ethics can be a useful guide in understanding the responsibilities of an anthropologist in conducting his or her research. The idea that researchers should protect the “communities” where they work is a central part of ethical fieldwork and is embodied in the Society for Applied Anthropology’s SfAA Code of Ethics (http://www.sfaa.net/sfaaethic.html). In my case, this raises an important issue. Is Santarém the “community” to which this refers, or is it the large-scale landowners of Santarém? What if the two interests conflict? The American Association of Anthropologists’ AAA Code of Ethics suggests that researchers have a fundamental responsibility to the people they work with to ensure that their work does not harm them. This responsibility supersedes the obligations to other elements of the research process, such as sponsors or clients. “Anthropological researchers must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does not harm the safety, dignity, or privacy of the people with whom they work, conduct research, or perform other professional activities” (AAA Code of Ethics, III.A.2.; http://www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ethcode.htm). Elements of the code have since been changed due to concerns about the involvement of anthropologists in the War on Terror, in particular anthropologists collecting intelligence and providing information to armed forces based in Iraq and Afghanistan. The following sentences were added: “Anthropologists should not withhold research results from research participants when those results are shared with others.” “There are circumstances where disclosure restrictions are appropriate and ethical, particularly where those restrictions serve to protect the safety, dignity or privacy of participants, protect cultural heritage or tangible 67

and intangible cultural or intellectual property.” “Anthropologists should not work clandestinely or misrepresent the nature, purpose, intended outcome, distribution or sponsorship of their research.” The central concern in applying these principles to my research is the potential difference between the interests of the large-scale landowners and the interests of the larger community represented by Santarém. Laying aside the idea that my work would explicitly advocate on behalf of my study population, even the very basic responsibility to “do no harm” is problematic when many critics blame “my” informants for the region’s persistent poverty. Any redistribution of land, for instance, would clearly reduce the power of the large-scale landowner. Some degree of land redistribution is bound to be an important part of achieving a socially just Amazon economy (Simmons et al. 2007), but is advocating a position that clearly reduces “my” group’s power “doing harm”? It depends on the trade-off involved, it seems to me. The agreement struck by farmers with The Nature Conservancy (Chapters 5 and 7) is an example of a decrease in power (over land-use decisions, in this instance) in exchange for a better economic climate for the production and sale of soybeans. It is my hope that my work can be used to increase the understanding of the goals and vision of large-scale landowners, allowing better compromises in the various conflicts about the future of the region. Some specific ideas are discussed in the conclusion (Chapter 7). The ethnographic nature of my research raises other questions. On a certain level it has been claimed that there is a degree of arrogance in speaking for others (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988). Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992, p. 28), writing against this critique, sees 68

ethnography as a noble pursuit when it allows the ethnographer to speak for the less powerful: And though I can hear the dissonant voices in the background protesting just this choice of words, I believe there is still a role for the ethnographer-writer in giving voice, as best she can, to those who have been silenced, as have the people of the Alto by political and economic oppression and illiteracy and as have their children by hunger and premature death. She justifies the use of ethnography in understanding the lives of the silenced, victims of an economic and political system, but her justification carries an implication that an ethnography of the powerful, who are not the victims but the beneficiaries of an economic and political system, would be subject to the full weight of the “arrogance of authorship” critique, and perhaps worse. Giving voice to the powerful may, in an extreme, be considered traitorous to the liberation of the powerless. From this view, an ethnography of an elite social group runs against the efforts of ethical anthropologists working in Latin America. The advantages of studying up in this case made up for the drawbacks in terms of social justice. The need for a more refined and nuanced understanding of rural elites is a gap in the scholarship that must be addressed, in order to have a more accurate basis for policy recommendations. This study is a beginning, not the end, of my search for the “right” way to conduct an ethnography of elite landowners in a community with overwhelming poverty. My work takes place within the context of a serious and divided political climate, so I imagine it will be potentially used within that debate. Because of these important ethical concerns, 69

researchers must be aware of how we position ourselves in describing our research objectives to informants (Bourgois 1990; Wong 1998). This is a general concern for anthropological fieldwork, but these dilemmas are exacerbated when the work involves powerful informants (Marcus 1983). Of course it is ethically correct to be honest with informants, but how much do you tell them? What if you know that some of the goals of your work will make them angry? H. Russell Bernard (2006) has a short section of his chapter on Participant Observation on the topic of “The Ethical Dilemma of Rapport,” in which he describes it as a “dark art” following Harry Wolcott (2005) and provides a story of E.E. Evans-Pritchard manipulating rivals, stirring jealousies, and hiring people to provide information about witchcraft among the Azande of Sudan. The deceit was successful and Evans-Pritchard gathered a tremendous amount of information, but he surely counted on the Azande not reading his published materials. In gaining access to the landowning elite, it is important to note that I was never expecting full inclusion. Since inclusion in an “elite” social group is by definition controlled and limited (Shore and Nugent 2002), it would not have been a reasonable goal, especially since the primary qualifications for joining the rural, landed elite, namely owning land and acting as a patron, were beyond my means. Nader (1972) noted early on that this is one of the serious drawbacks to studying up and suggested that participant observation may not be possible in these types of studies. I had to position myself in reference to the people I was studying in a way that was legible to them. It had to be a position that was sympathetic enough to gain their trust. There was a 70

danger in letting these concerns of access and rapport dominate the way I described my interests and goals, however. I was not going to report that the landowners were Saints or that they bore no responsibility for the high rate of deforestation and endemic poverty in the region, so this meant that I had to negotiate a position between these two poles of inaccessibility and dishonesty. The ethical complications of working with large-scale landowners in the Amazon were made even more difficult by the fact that ideas about the future of the Amazon have become polarized in Santarém (see Chapter 3). Instead, I worked to create an identity that was novel in Santarém, that of an outside researcher who was willing to turn a sympathetic eye to the economic and political goals of large landowners. Researchers work in Santaém in order to learn about small-scale farmers, the urban poor, indigenous groups, and caboclos. I made the case that I was doing something similar, but instead of documenting the lives and viewpoints of the poor, I was documenting and explaining the lives of those who were able to build up a larger operation. I made it clear that I wanted to complicate the story line that portrayed them as a homogeneous group of villains (see Appendix 2). The consequence of this position was significant, in terms of my life in the field. Nearly every other foreigner and Brazilian from outside the region was aligned with the smallholders and environmental groups. Because I had been clear about my sympathy with the large landowners and my intention to challenge the negative ideas about them, the local researchers and activists had some reservations about my intentions and my moral compass. Despite this marginality, I did spend time with them in the nearby community of Alter do Chão, where I rented a house 71

for my family during my fieldwork. I welcomed the chance to have a social life outside my research goals, but on more than one occasion large landowners saw me socializing with activists. I was troubled by how this appeared to them. Did it look disloyal? I had an instance of the reverse in which I was sharing some drinks with a few landowners when a group of researchers from the South passed by and greeted me. I spent the next few minutes anticipating questions from the landowners and mentally preparing my response, but they never asked about this greeting. Americans working in the Brazilian Amazon face ethical challenges due to their nationality, as well. Because the common perception is that American interests are an underlying cause for the difficulties faced by large-scale landowners in the region, it struck many landowners as ironic that an American was asking for their view of these difficulties. Henry Ford’s schemes in the Amazon took place in nearby Belterra, a community which lies within my study area, and most landowners were aware of the history of American companies seeking wealth from the resources in the Amazon. They thought that I would be more informed than they were about how Americans want to ruin the lives of the most productive people in the Amazon in order to claim the land for their own uses. In these circumstances, it was sometimes useful to note that the theory of an American takeover of the Amazon is not widely circulating outside the Amazon and ideas like this are exactly what I wanted to learn and convey. The ethical compromise in this case was the fact that I never intended to represent this conspiracy as a likely policy that was unknown, but rather would present it as an idea with regional significance because of the history of resource exploitation by outsiders.

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When my (then) wife and daughter arrived, my sympathetic view of large landowners became a significant issue within my family, because she preferred the company of environmentalists and outside researchers and felt an allegiance to their goals for the region. She went so far as to suggest that working with large landowners in the Amazon is an inherently immoral undertaking. It is an understatement to say that the position I claimed in order to conduct my research complicated my social relationships among new friends and within my family, however I could not imagine a more honest way to interact with both groups in such a polarized setting. My effort to find ways to see past the oversimplified ideas about large-scale landowners and my effort to find ways to support positive social change that did not “harm” them both benefited from my effort to understand them in their own terms. In other words, I sought a solution to the ethical dilemma and the polarized rhetorical climate through ethnography. My hope remains that this position will allow a better return to the field. If the landowners and researchers both see through this research that I am honestly reporting on the social lives of large landowners with a sympathetic view, but without ignoring the consequences of social inequality and the expansion of industrial agriculture, then perhaps both sides will see that I am trustworthy, even though I am not a full ally.

The Process of Gaining Rapport The seemingly simple task of arranging a brief presentation at the Sindicato Rural turned out to be a difficult process of negotiating access. Even after I explained my research goals, 73

they were still concerned that I was secretly an unsympathetic foreign researcher. They characterized foreign researchers as being concerned primarily with deforestation and the rural poor, especially native Brazilians. They expected information about large-scale landowners to be used to advocate for policies that contradict their goals and limit their potential for success, which is not an unreasonable fear. I hope that this potential is offset by the positive potential of showing the large-scale landowners in a better (more nuanced and realistic) light than studies in which they are the villains causing the suffering of the people being studied. In order to allay some of their concerns, the Sindicato Rural executive board requested a letter from my school attesting to my intentions and the goals of my study. They were concerned primarily that my work was part of a larger non-government organization (NGO) strategy that was aimed at destroying the agricultural economy of the region. The process of getting a letter to the membership before my presentation was as difficult as any of the bureaucracy I dealt with during my fieldwork (which is saying a lot). Email server problems and difficulties making contact by phone with people who are generally very busy with their own business pursuits on top of their work for the Sindicato Rural created a series of delays. After finally accepting and checking my credentials, the Sindicato Rural allowed me to present my research questions and goals to the members gathered at their next monthly meeting. While waiting for the meeting to begin, I was able to sit among the members, and in this setting they were very open and friendly. This was my first experience with the landowners being open with me and it was exhilarating. They remained candid even after I explained 74

that I was a researcher studying the social lives of large-scale landowners, a topic they found to be very unlikely. I was lucky enough to sit next to a member of the Vieira family, one of the most important elite families in Santarém. Behind me was a Gaúcho farmer who had bought a piece of land that once had been part of a rubber plantation owned by the Vieira family. I introduced myself and shared a little about my interests. The farmer’s land had already been cleared beyond the legal limit, so he was going to leave the rubber trees standing despite the inefficiencies of an irregular farm footprint and his lack of interest in natural rubber production. He was considering whether to allow some of his smallholder neighbors to collect and sell the rubber on commission as they had requested. He was hesitant because he had little experience with rubber and he had already been cheated when the first batch of rubber that he bought was diluted and contained added foreign materials. Since he had paid the neighbors by weight but sold to someone who paid based on both weight and purity, this resulted in a net loss. Mr. Vieira shared some advice related to the way that the rubber collection can best be monitored. He mentioned that in the past, his family would sometimes hire one of the tappers to be held accountable for the quality of the rubber with good results. The new farmer thought he knew just the right man to whom to designate this responsibility. After a brief wait, I was able to present my questions and concerns to the farmers (see Appendix 2 for the handout I provided). I spoke for about 20 minutes and then took questions. I wanted them to understand the basic motivations and methods of my study, but I was more interested in addressing their questions than in lecturing. The questions were confrontational, as I had expected, but one particular questioner revealed a serious mistake in my language. I had used the term “sojeiro,” as it had seemed to me to be the local 75

term for soy farmers who moved up to Santarém from the south. Sojeiro was the common term used to refer to the farmers on the radio, in the local papers, and among the Brazilian researchers I spoke with at LBA (Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazônia) and Embrapa (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária/Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation). Erik Marmo, a respected Gaúcho farmer spoke for a short time about what an insult it is to have this term used to describe the farmers who came to Santarém to farm the land. He described how it calls upon the image of a “sujeiro,” which is a vagabond or criminal. I used the opportunity to express that this type of correction of popular perception is exactly what I was hoping to receive. I explained that my study is intended to understand their perspective and share a vision that is lacking in the general academic community and unwelcome among some environmentalists. At the end of this period the leadership suggested that they were open to providing my handouts to the membership, but they were more interested in reviewing my findings and wanted my word that I would share these with them when they were ready. I will therefore prepare a summary version of this dissertation to distribute in Santarém, along with a copy of it in its entirety to be left at the Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS), a copy for the Embrapa library in Belém, and a copy for the Sindicato Rural. Following this presentation, landowners were more receptive to my requests for interviews, but some barriers to access remained. Besides the imposed limitations on access used as a defense against perceived enemies, there are other reasons access is limited. The large-scale landowners are typically very busy. For the local ranching elite, land ownership and farm management is often a secondary or tertiary concern, and they were very reluctant to take time away from their 76

other activities to discuss their farms. Many of the ranchers are only in Santarém for part of the year, spending the rest of their time in other Amazon locations (Manaus, Belém, or other properties) or to other, typically urban, destinations elsewhere in Brazil (São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Fortaleza, etc.). There they would manage other investments or visit family. Most of their children attended universities in the south. While other business concerns and travel made scheduling difficult with the long-time landowners, those who had moved to the region recently also had limited schedules. The Gaúchos were more often on their farm, but when they were on the farm, they were also very busy dealing with equipment, sales of their crops, or purchases of inputs and supplies. During the time I was there, the prices of soybeans and rice were low and the farmers were more hands-on because many had laid off their farm managers, or hired less expensive local farm managers who were less experienced than the managers from the South or Central West. They were scrambling to get equipment repaired with scarce funds, rushing to get their crops sold before another drop in price, or selling something to help make ends meet. I learned that they do not rest in front of their workers on the farm, since that was a bad image to cultivate among employees. On the farm they rushed around and got their hands dirty. If they rested, it was in town at the farm supply stores or at restaurants with friends. The farmers employing mechanized agriculture were also concerned about providing me with information that might be passed on to American farmers, who were seen as competitors. They also asked me about the farming practices of American farmers in technical terms. Unfortunately, I am not trained in agronomy (their chief concern), but I 77

eagerly shared what I knew of the economic history and social context of family-run mechanized grain farms in America. They were always surprised to learn that many middle-class farmers were driven out of business by large corporate farms and a credit crisis in the mid-1980s (Barlett, 1993). Sharing this history was a good lead-in for conversations about their image as wealthy landowners versus their self-perception as hard-working under-capitalized entrepreneurs. In their minds, they were making a big investment that was not sure of success, and which would require a great deal of time and effort before they would see results. Because they are at the mercy of much larger forces, the story of an American farmer who was caught between bank payments and shrinking crop prices was familiar to them.

Methodology Participant Observation Participant observation, in the sense of full inclusion in the group being studied (Crick 1992), was not possible. The linguistic and cultural distance between us was obvious to both the landowners and me. However, I endeavored to share many experiences with the landowners and attended social events with them whenever possible, sharing rides as they went into town or out to their farms, going to birthday parties and spending time with them at the tractor supply stores and local beaches. This also included time spent on the farms as work was conducted and as I waited for interviews to begin or as we spent time together after interviews ended. I found that the parts supply stores for their farm

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equipment was a location where many Gaúcho landowners were relaxed and willing to socialize. This was a space for relaxed and open-ended dialog as farmers and store owners/managers discussed the difficulties and expenses involved in farming in such a remote location. I also attended meetings held on agricultural issues organized by farmers and ranchers or their representative organizations. I attended as many of the events related to the Sindicato Rural and the new Cooperative as I was able. Governmentorganized public meetings, designed to gather public input regarding projects such as the development of the Cuiabá-Santarém Highway corridor, were very common during my fieldwork period as a component of the Worker’s Party (local and national governments) efforts to promote more direct citizen involvement. The more politically involved landowners made a point of attending all of the public meetings. I found these to be an excellent opportunity to talk quite openly with the landowners, although other researchers expressed some surprise to see me sitting with the large-scale landowners rather than with the environmentalists, activists, and researchers. These events were often emotionally charged and landowners were usually willing to express strong opinions either agreeing or disagreeing with the speakers.

Interviews Two types of interviews were conducted. The first consisted of unstructured interviews that sought to accurately capture the local perspective on the lives of large-scale farmers and ranchers (Figure 4.1). In these interviews, I sought to achieve both rapport and collect data, using a variety of descriptive, structural, and contrast questions (Spradley 1979). 79

James Spradley (1979) notes the necessity of providing ethnographic explanations in unstructured interviews and the informants I interviewed were often quite interested in my study and the types of data I was collecting. I recorded some, but not all of these interviews, relying on note taking alone when the landowners were not comfortable making statements that could be replayed under different circumstances—perhaps over the radio or to a law enforcement agency. My notes were taken in shorthand or heavily abbreviated and rewritten later at home with additional information added from memory. I tried to be consistent in rewriting these notes at home in the evening after the interview, as it has been suggested that the accuracy of information recalled by the researcher declines after this point. “Although memory and recall improve with practice, no ethnographer should depend on memory alone for reconstructing fieldnotes, especially because memory is selective and easily biased, and recall diminishes notably even on important topics after 24 hours” (Schensul et al. 1999, p. 116). I recorded fieldnotes in the same notebook as my fieldwork diary and my weekly agenda and appointments. This was a “field log” in Bernard’s (2006) terms.

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Figure 4.1. The author interviewing a landowner.

In Santarém, I conducted formal interviews and opportunistic semi-structured interviews. These were recorded for later transcription whenever possible, although there were times when the interviewee declined to allow the interview to be recorded. I also conducted unstructured interviews with landowners and their employees in various circumstances (see Table 4.1 for types of interviewees). I interviewed relevant government agencies and NGOs that had regulatory or other influence over the landowners’ activities. I interviewed business owners and employees who work in related activities (agriculture supplies, ranching supplies, technical support, etc.) as well as neighboring farmers, although the

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latter were somewhat counterproductive in terms of establishing trust and became a very small part of my research. I also interviewed a number of local researchers and academics. Table 4.1. Structured and unstructured interviews conducted in Santarém.

Large-scale landowners Land dealers/Realtors Business owners Government officials Family members Employees/Farm managers Researchers/Professors NGOs Other farmers (medium- and small-scale)

Formal and semistructured interviews 23 4 23 10 8 13 16 4 3

Unstructured, informal interviews 11 1 13 15 6 5 20 7 12

Property-Based Interviews A second set of interviews were conducted with landowners on their farms. I used maps produced from satellite images to discuss the land-use practices and land-use history of the farmers and ranchers. These were RGB 5,4,3 composites of unclassified Landsat images overlaid with a property grid delineated by INCRA and a roads dataset (Figure 4.2) (see Brondízio et al. 1996, D’Antona et al 2008, Moran et al. 1994, Moran et al. 2005 for more on the use of Landsat-derived field maps). GPS data were collected when permitted by the owners to make the link between farm decisions, interview data, and the landscape spatially explicit. I always turned the receiver off when I entered private property. I felt that this was an ethical issue and a manner of showing respect to the property owner. I was glad for this on several occasions, when I was able to build enough trust to begin

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discussions of using a GPS unit. They were always impressed that I had respected their property rights by turning the unit off until I had their permission to use it. While this meant that I was able to collect a much more limited set of GPS data, the landowners were generally willing to discuss the map and identify the boundaries of their properties through a visual inspection. The use of satellite images in conducting survey-based fieldwork has proven to be fruitful in elucidating the linkages between social processes at the household level with changes on the properties associated with those households (Moran and Brondízio 1998; Moran et al. 2005). The method has advantages in revealing patterns in behavior that would not be visible with smaller time frames based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork alone, or with image classification absent social and cultural contextualization. “Our work in Marajó, for instance, has changed how we conceptualize Caboclo populations and their engagement in the regional economy” (Moran and Brondízio 1998, p. 115). Regional economic events and settlement history can then be related to changes in the landscape by scaling up from these data sources (McCracken et al. 2002; Walker et al. 2002). Unfortunately, the number of large-scale landowners who allowed me to introduce satellite images was small. Furthermore, the small number of points they were willing to allow me to collect, in combination with their hesitancy in identifying property boundaries from the INCRA property grid, meant that I was very limited in my ability to use a spatially explicit analysis in this project. While I was unable to build enough trust to be able to directly relate the interviews to property boundaries that could be analyzed using Geographic Information Software, I was able to map GPS points to determine an approximate location of the properties. 83

Figure 4.2. Example of interview map (with landowners’ names obscured). Pink represents land that is under use, while dark green is forested land. I was able to conduct a few long interviews based on the field maps with unclassified Landsat images (see Figure 4.2). While the potential for using the maps as part of a spatially explicit analysis was curtailed by the landowners’ lack of trust in a foreign researcher, these interviews were often very informative about the history of the region and the neighboring properties and social context of land deals. The interviewees would comment at length about the history of their own properties and their neighbors’ properties. The maps were familiar to them, especially among the Gaúchos who used similar images in their interactions with land dealers. It was obvious that the farmers were intensely aware of the intersection between the INCRA property grid overlaid on the 84

satellite image and the history of property sales, even if they were unwilling to identify the boundaries of their own properties. Without exception, they were able to identify several other large-scale landowners based on the features visible in the map, using the property grid, road network, and rural villages, in combination with the properties of the unclassified Landsat image displayed in 5,4,3, such as bright red/pink areas indicating clearings and dark green indicating mature forest. They would then share stories of how that property had been bought and sold. Although the history of this transactional memory of properties in the Santarém region is shallow (dating back to the late 1990s in some cases) for most Gaúchos, the number of transactions was large. The agenda of some farmers in assembling ever larger areas to farm, or in speculating about the expected rise in property values was a consistent theme of these interviews, and the farmers expressed a folk typology of aggressive expanders or conservative farmers. During one such interview, a landowner pointed to the location of a property on the map as he explained the current land market near his property. He had purchased the property for around 60 or 70 Reais ($30 to $40 USD) per hectare, but then mentioned that the prices had since gone up to nearly 3,000 Reais ($2000 USD) per hectare. Me: “$R3000 Reais!? Is anyone selling? Landowner: “Yes, there are. I have a neighbor selling for about that much.” [He indicated on the map where the property was. It lay between two areas he already owned. One was cleared and under mechanized production and the other had a fairly sizable reserve, possibly due to the difficulty of access. The area for sale was almost entirely degraded pasture.] 85

Me: “3,000 reais. Do you think this value is justified?” Landowner: “It really depends on whether they have documentation. There is a big problem here with folks that have areas that are not [properly] documented.” [The way he said this suggested to me that he knew that the seller did not have proper documentation, although this is exactly the type of information that the large-scale landowners would not be open and clear about.]3

Archival Research Finally, in order to contextualize the expansion of soybeans into the Amazon relative to the history of mechanized agriculture in Brazil and the history of economic development schemes in the Amazon, archival research was conducted in a variety of research centers, archives, and libraries. First, there was a wealth of local archival materials at ICBS, where I was hosted by the distinguished local historian Cristovão Sena. Non-local sites were also visited in pursuit of documents and published research related to the historical expansion of mechanized agriculture from the South up through the Central West to the North. I traveled to Belém for coordination with researchers at Embrapa Amazônia Oriental and for archival research in the library at Embrapa and the library at Museu Goeldi. I traveled throughout Mato Grosso visiting farmers and farm-related industries in Sorriso, Nova Mutum, Sinop, and Lucas do Rio Verde, and the Mato Grosso Cultural Center in Cuiabá.

3

Italicized indented text indicates that the quote is reconstructed from my field notes. 86

During this trip, I interviewed more than a dozen soybean farmers and conducted interviews with the managers or owners of businesses related to tractor and agrochemical supplies, grain dealers, cooperatives, and NGOs working on various political fronts in favor of soybean farmers. In São Paulo, I spent two days with the faculty at Universidade do São Paulo campus at Piracicaba, especially the Escola Superior de Agricultura “Luiz de Queiroz” ESALQ, and two days each interviewing university researchers and agribusiness representatives in Porto Alegre and Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Súl.

Accuracy and Precision of Data A thorough survey of economic and land-use decisions made by large-scale landowners would have been ideal for this study, but this was impossible due to the landowners’ unwillingness to create such an official record of their decisions and leave this record in the hands of a foreigner. They would share this information, but in ways that defied assembly of their decisions into systematic, quantified data. I made extensive notes of their comments and their claims, usually expressed in relative rather than absolute terms. Throughout this dissertation, therefore, their decisions are expressed in terms of “most” landowners following a particular pattern, or the local elite “usually” making a particular decision. Language that expresses greater precision would not be an accurate representation of the data collected. Interestingly, another researcher in the area two years earlier had remarkable success in getting quantitative data on land-use and land-buying decisions (Steward 2004). Her

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research overlaps with this research project, in that both of us are following the expansion of soybeans, however her focus was on the way soybean agriculture represents a particular ideology of development for Santarém, contrasting this ideology with one that would be more strongly based on the activities of smallholders and non-industrial production systems, while my focus is on the relationship between the arriving soybean farmers and the local elite. Several of the farmers I spoke with remembered her and on two separate occasions they expressed surprise that a researcher who they identified primarily as a young attractive foreign woman would be able to publish the information they gave to her. Her research methodology makes clear that she was not hiding her intensions or affiliations (Steward 2004), but it appears that many of the farmers thought it unreasonable to expect high-caliber research from a young woman whom they considered to be attractive. In contrast, their initial expectations of me included a belief that I must have important connections among policy makers and international researchers. Gender identity has an influence on data collection (Callaway 1992; Gailey 1998; Okely 2007). In the Brazilian Amazon, this means there may be trade-offs between male researchers faced with high expectations of professionalism and greater suspicion compared to relatively low expectations of professionalism for women combined with a greater willingness of some landowners to provide potentially damaging information. The female researchers with whom I discussed this issue mentioned the difficulty of being taken seriously in presenting their research locally. Because the climate of distrust and suspicion increased between the two study periods, gender is not the only factor to consider, and may be less significant than suggested by the behavior of my informants.

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However, in the Brazilian Amazon, women may be more capable of gathering sensitive information, at least during times of perceived threat by landowners.

Data Analysis In the field, I hired local Brazilian students to transcribe some of my interviews. Fourteen of the most important interviews were transcribed, and the rest were either short or contained a limited amount of useful data. I incorporated the notes taken during the interviews with the follow-up notes developed after the interview. Upon my return to the United States, I began the process of analyzing my data, first by coding my fieldnotes using a three-part code to sort notes from my interviews and observational notes into three categories: (1) those related to farmers, (2) those related to ranchers, and (3) those about environmentalists. Most of the interviews with farmers covered a great deal of material about ranchers and environmentalists for each of the three groups. The system proved to be time-consuming and unwieldy, however, so I worked intuitively and directly from my field notebook and the transcriptions instead.

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Chapter 5 The Arrival of Mechanized Agriculture in Santarém

The expansion of soybeans and mechanized agriculture from the South to the Central West was a process that reflects the dynamics of capitalist penetration into a frontier region. It was also the result of a concerted effort by political and economic leaders to position Brazil well in the global agricultural economy, and support the previously discussed goals related to territorial, economic, and social integration of the interior (Chapter 2). Meanwhile, the Amazon was being “developed” through a process that extracted wealth from the region, within a framework that perceived the Amazon as having both great potential and difficult obstacles. Within the Amazon, the various residents and landowners tried to adapt to the policy, economic, and environmental conditions they faced (Chapter 3). All these parties and trends collided when mechanized agriculture arrived in the Amazon. This chapter describes the arrival of mechanized agriculture in Santarém from the perspective of the Gaúchos. Although there had been small experimental plots of mechanized agriculture previously, when the Gaúchos arrived, they initiated a much wider and more substantial transformation of the landscape and economy of Santarém, driven by the production of soybeans and rice on a large scale. The migration of Gaúchos to Santarém is reflective of more than an inevitable march of capitalism into the rural periphery. Gaúcho farmers have a sense of identity shaped by their history of modernizing frontier regions and establishing new farm homesteads. These personal achievements bolstered their self90

image as rural entrepreneurs and members of a social group driving economic growth and rural development in Brazil. This identity contrasted with that of the local elite, shaped by a local history of extractive economic activities, merchant capitalism and a series of boomand-bust cycles. I will discuss other ways that developments in Santarém helped to usher in the arrival of mechanized agriculture. The local elite used their land to establish cattle ranches, but a few experimented with mechanized agriculture. The ranchers welcomed interest from global agribusiness, and built up political support for large-scale agriculture ahead of the arrival of the Gaúcho farmers. The arrival of the latter resulted from “push” factors, or incentives for Gaúcho farmers to leave the South and Central West to establish new farms further north, and other “pull” factors drawing these farmers to Santarém, in particular. The Gaúchos’ migration paths to Santarém varied (Figure 5.1). Most farmers moved to Santarém from the Central West (Mato Grosso or Goiás) following a previous migration from the South to the Central West. However, some farmers moved to Santarém after a migration from the South to the Northeast (Bahia) or other parts of the North (Roraima and Rondônia).

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Figure 5.1. Examples of Gaúchos’ migration paths to Santarém. Paraná – Novo Mutum, Mato Grosso – Sinop, Mato Grosso – Santarém Rio Grande do Sul – Paraná – Paraguai – Sinop, Mato Grosso – Santarém Rio Grande do Sul – Campo Novo, Mato Grosso – Rio Grande do Sul – Bahia – Santarém Santa Catarina – Lucas do Rio Verde, Mato Grosso – Santarém Santa Catarina – Santarém See full list in Appendix 1.

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Not Just Economics: The Vision and Self-Perception of Gaúcho Migrants Land Consolidation Gaúcho migration is influenced by the shortage of land for expansion in the South and land consolidation by heavily capitalized farmers in Mato Grosso during periods of recession and hardship. The wife of one of my informants reported that they had preferred to expand operations within Mato Grosso, because the infrastructure was already in place and the kind of lifestyle they live was established there. “I wanted to expand there [near Sinop], but the prices weren’t right, so we are here.” In interviews I conducted in the Mato Grosso towns of Sinop and Lucas do Rio Verde, some farmers mentioned expanding their current operations through purchasing land from less capitalized or struggling neighbors on multiple occasions. The rural union in Sinop reported that the average farm size in Sinop was increasing. Successful and capitalized farmers are clearly able to expand in Mato Grosso. A farmer in Lucas Do Rio Verde took me on a tour of the land areas he had acquired, noting the former boundaries of different owners and showing how he was now consolidating these into a single operation. At least two of these plots had been acquired due to hardship, and one of the pieces of land was being rented to him, but he expected the owner to sell soon. For farmers in the Central West, the amount of crops produced is a measure of social standing in the community, so finding ways to expand an operation is a necessary task for upward social mobility. “In conversation, the number of hectares planted in soybeans or the number of sacks held in storage is used to indicate the importance of community members in the local hierarchy” (Fisher 2007, p. 353). The problem arises when expansion 93

causes prices to rise, as it did in Mato Grosso, and some farmers can’t afford to expand at the higher prices. In order to expand, these farmers need to look elsewhere for available land. A farmer described his decision to leave Mato Grosso and start a new farm in Santarém, “Santarém presents an opportunity. I was fine in Mato Grosso, but there was not the same opportunity.” Another farmer in Santarém who was one of the earliest arrivals from Mato Grosso explained the type of farmer who was driven to leave Mato Grosso in order to expand in Santarém, “I knew some of the farmers here [Santarém] when they were in Mato Grosso and they weren’t as big as they are here. They were basically little guys [in Mato Grosso]. That’s why they left.” Several farmers in Santarém reported that these periods of consolidation in Mato Grosso were caused by an agricultural crisis including drought, rising or falling exchange rates, and pest outbreaks. Farmers who were in poor financial shape faced a difficult decision after these crises to continue farming without enough capital or to take on more debt. The farmers who weathered a crisis with enough capital in reserve were in a good position to buy their neighbors' farms at a reduced price when a crisis led to many farmers selling at the same time. Some farmers who sold chose to become workers in related businesses (farm equipment, input sales, etc.) or managers on other farms, while others chose to move on to a new frontier. One of the farmers in Santarém worked for a tractor dealer in Mato Grosso after selling his small farm to a neighbor. “[The store where he worked] has guaranteed work and when the economy is uncertain that is positive.” This same farmer, however, returned to farming with his brother-in-law in Santarém, saying, “Some people just have to farm, understand?” The status of a store worker is considerably lower than a farmer, and the chance to rise out of a failed farming venture and establish himself as a 94

successful farmer is a very enticing incentive. The financial risks are high, but that only adds to their status, if they are successful. Sensitive to the need for economies of scale, they moved into areas with lower land values, where they were able to buy larger farms than in Mato Grosso. An example is provided by two brothers who moved to Santarém from the Central West in 2003.

We hope that this is a good opportunity to improve our children’s fortunes and leave something good for them, but it is difficult to live so poorly. We don’t have electricity and the house is unpainted. We are two families living together and this is difficult. In the South we each would have our own house. Many things are very poor quality here, but we feel better off than our neighbors. We can wear more than one set of church clothes, while they always wear the same clothes. It is not comfortable. We feel a responsibility to help them, but we are not wealthy enough to offer much. There are seven or eight people who work for us from time to time, but we keep rotating the people to try to help more . . . We can’t afford to employ all of them at once. The brothers are from Santa Catarina, where their families and their wives’ families were all small-scale farmers. The farms they grew up on were mainly coffee plantations, diversified with pigs, chickens, vegetable gardens, and fruit trees. The farms were no larger than 10–20 ha, so when it came time for the brothers’ parents to pass the land to their children, they agreed to let their oldest brother keep the land in Santa Catarina, rather than split it up among the brothers. They decided to buy land in Mato Grosso, rather than the

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South, because they could buy more land for the same price in the Central West. During this interview, one of the wives explained the importance of scale: “We spent three years in Sorriso but were hit by the drought there. It is very difficult to be a small or medium farmer in that area, because the large farmers are so competitive that they squeeze out the others.”

Highlighting the supremacy of scale of production over all other concerns, another family who had relocated to Santarém lamented the fact that they could not have expanded within Mato Grosso, where the wife’s family was located. The brothers feel a great deal of pressure on them to succeed in Santarém because of the sacrifices they made in moving away from the familiarity and support of family. Santarém was seen by many families as a place with higher risk of failure due to the difficulty of transportation and the more limited access to the main commercial agriculture infrastructure in the Southeast. Low land prices allowed for the possibility of consolidating an area large enough to survive the lean years given the better profit margins for larger areas in cultivation. “The price was very good for the land. That is the main thing here.” When discussing their motivations for moving to Santarém, the possibility of expansion and the fact that it is an “opportunity” are consistently mentioned. This contrasts with other descriptions about the expansion of mechanized agriculture in the region. These mention the presence of Cargill as the primary motivation for farmers (Fearnside 2001, 2007; Nepstad et al. 2006; Oliveira and Torres 2005; Steward 2004, 2007). Interestingly, in discussing their decision to farm in Santarém, none of the farmers mentioned Cargill without prompting. Despite this, one has to assume that the presence of a facility operated by an established agribusiness corporation would bring some sense of hope about the 96

economic development potential of the region. I suspect that they view the presence of Cargill as an element that is included in their calculations among other elements like land price, likelihood of drought, and presence of supply dealers, rather than as a single deciding element on its own. Furthermore, these cold calculations seem to be far less meaningful to them than the potential to expand and produce more. Many farmers talked about the balance of risk and opportunity in Santarém. Describing an earlier wave of migration into the Central West, William Fisher (2007, p. 353) wrote, “During the initial period real estate speculators from the south who had acquired land returned to the southern states to resell parcels. Given favorable prices compared to land in the south. Many took the risk, joining a long and illustrious parade of immigrants to Brazil’s north in search of wealth.” This same attitude is reflected in the analysis of a farmer in Santarém, “Santarém is not an agricultural area. It has potential, but there are many risks. The cost [of land] is what brought agriculture here.” Some of those who chose to move to Santarém were visionaries with ambition; others were less experienced farmers who could not afford to farm in the South or Central West. Regardless of their experience or skill level, they shared a common sense of pride in their potential role as “founders” of a new agricultural area. This same farmer said, “When I first got here people were very prejudiced against me, but we brought technology and showed them how to use it. They can see the great potential of the area now, and this is because we came here and established our farms.”

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Gaúchos as Missionaries of Development The pride of opening up a new area to agriculture is central to the cultural identity of these farmers. Their sense of themselves is reflected in their claims to have a positive impact on the region, which was poor and “undeveloped.” They often refer to their activities as “development” “producing” and the region as populated, but “lacking development” and “unproductive,” showing both the space they hope to occupy in society and their vision of the region’s problems. One of the largest farmers put it this way: In reality, there was certainly no vision, and any kind of perspective that understood agricultural development in the region [Western Pará State] was rare. Look, I know one or two farmers who had some experience, just a little bit, but who really decided to put down roots here on a large scale? I believe we were among the first pioneers. This region has good climate, good soil, has areas that are already exploited. These were not wild areas. This whole farm had already been cleared without any forest at all, only degraded pasture, so it was easy. . . . So, two or three years ago there was some uncertainty and we did not know what the potential of the region would be [for mechanized agriculture], but we decided to establish a base here.

Ideas about Migration and Identity as Missionaries of Modernity Culturally, the establishment of a “home property” is important, even if it will only be a jumping-off point for the next generation. This home property serves as a center for the

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family to gather during holidays and as an essential element in the family identity. This desire for a physical base for the family and a site to build their family wealth is similar to the “house model” described by Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera (1990), although the way resources flow and the labor trading system are different among the Gaúchos than among the poorer Columbians described in their research. While their parents’ or grandparents’ farms in the South are often still the family homesteads for farmers in Santarém, some have indicated that they want to establish their own homestead in Santarém. Several farmers travelled with their families back to the family homestead in the South for holidays, funerals or other important family events. There were also times when the farmers returned to their parents’ farms to deal with family affairs. Two examples from the lives of farmers in Santarém that I recall were a death in the family and the start of a new business venture. Family histories I heard tended to highlight their original migration to Brazil, and the modernization and economic vitality of the regions that their ancestors occupied. “We are Italian. Do you know what that means? It means we have always been the ones to improve Brazil. Do you know about coffee? Well, that is another good example.” Another farmer noted that his heritage motivated for his work to modernize Amazon agriculture, “I grew up in an area that was very German, so I know how a place needs to be organized and improved.” They claimed that ethnic heritage and culture shaped their economic behavior, making them ambitious, persistent, and well organized, which, in turn, were attributes likely to make them wealthy and create a strong local economy.

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While these ideas about the interplay of ethnic origins and agriculture were common, I also encountered Gaúcho farmers who rejected ethnic stereotypes, particularly about indigenous populations. Some expressed a desire for these people to adopt mechanized agriculture, suggesting that it would alleviate poverty. “It is embarrassing how poor they are. As Brazilians we should be ashamed. The Xavante are committing suicide because they want development that is being denied to them. Why?” This is an interesting contrast with the perspective of the foremost ethnographer of the Xavante, David Mayberry-Lewis (1992), who sees the encroachment of capitalist practices as a destabilizing and degrading influence on the Xavante communities. Other researchers have noted that the burden of disease among the Xavante has increased as they have become more socially and economically connected with non-Indians in the region (Coimbra et al. 2002). Whatever the scientist say, the popular perception among the Gaúchos is that Xavante problems were caused by a lack of capitalism and modernity, not its presence. It is unlikely the Xavante can enter into high-capital agriculture on their own terms, so I suspect this would bring more harm than good. Treating Indigenous Reserves as a refuge from capitalism, however may limit the ability of Xavante to realize their goals. For Gaúchos, their national identity, in addition to their ethnic identity, is an important part of the ideology of development. Several farmers discussed Brazilian national qualities. “Brazil has certain advantages [compared to other nations] and one of these is land area. This advantage disappears if we can’t use it.” Another farmer said, “Farming here must become more modern, we are going to lose ground to America and Europe if we don’t improve. This does not just mean our technology, but the techniques related to soil, fertilizers, crop rotations, and related industries like raising chickens.” Political leaders 100

shared this view and consistently contextualized local activities in terms of national and international issues. A former mayor stated at a political event in 2005, “Santarém is a national solution for the Brazilian economy. With the shortened route from the Central West and the conversion of underutilized land, Santarém represents the future.” Whether considering the personal, family, or national implications of their move, the central idea they hold is that they are harbingers of progress and order, as the banner on the Brazilian flag states, “Order and Progress,” One landowner explained, “The Brazilian flag is the most complete in the world. It has everything you need to know right there. We have everything we need to be a very prosperous country. You can’t have order without progress . . . without investment.” The mental model is the Brazilian South, as evidenced by the common reference to that region when discussing the nature of development and progress. The clean streets, well-organized stores, efficient governments, and strong economies are all central images in their civic projects, but public infrastructure and even modes of dress were commonly mentioned. The expectation was that the North would become more and more like the South as it gained wealth. While the South is the ideal model, the arriving farmers in Santrém call upon their prior experiences in the Central West to understand the process of migration and their role in improving the prospects for economic development in Santarém. I interviewed a family who had moved from Paraná in 1976 to establish a new farm in original Mato Grosso. They were able to build a successful farm but chose to move to Santarém to try to expand their operations. During this interview, they expressed the idea that the Gaúcho migration to Santarém repeats the process that occurred in Mato Grosso: “This is the second time we’ve

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been through this process.” They arrived in original Mato Grosso without water, electricity, or telephone service, and they remembered this when they saw rudimentary infrastructure in the rural areas outside Santarém. They used several examples to show how they helped develop the infrastructure in Mato Grosso and described the ways that their former community is much better off today. They described how they had joined their neighbors to build a school and how they are discussing the need to improve the schools and roads near their farm in Santarém. They expressed confidence that Santarém will develop in the same ways that Mato Grosso did, and think that in several years it will be very similar to Mato Grosso.

The Process: Establishing a Farm in Santarém The majority of Gaúchos who arrived in Santarém were at a stage in their lives when they had children who were old enough to start working on the farm, but not to buy their own farms. The Torloni family represents a typical pattern of establishing a farm in Santarém. Mr. Torlini first visits during one of the agricultural events in the region, such as Encontro de Agronegocios (The Annual Agribusiness Meeting), Feira de Agropecuaria (Farmers’ Fair – similar to a county or state fair in the U.S.), a Cargill meeting, or some form of outreach put on by a grain storage and/or agricultural supply company, such as Mato Grosso Cereais. During this visit, he collects information about the climate and soil conditions from government agencies, Cargill, and one or more of the agricultural consulting firms. Then, he visits the local seed and input suppliers and an established farm (Figure 5.2), usually one of a handful of farmers in Santarém who has vertically integrated and invested in storage facilities. It is important for Mr. Torloni to find someone who is successful locally, and it is 102

part of the role of a successful farmer in these agricultural expansion zones in Brazil to provide important information to the farmers who follow. Mr. Torloni would then talk with land agents about available parcels of land, or visit farmers whom he already knew from the Central West or South to learn about properties for sale in Santarém. Mr. Torloni could then return home with this information to make his decision.

Figure 5.2. Farmers watching soy being harvested as part of a local farm tour, 2003.

According to the Gaúchos I interviewed, the lands they sought were flat areas with good access to roads and low vegetation. They said they wanted to avoid forested land because it is illegal and, more important, expensive to clear. They reported that the men who clear land for farmers charge nearly twice as much to clear mature forest than to work land that 103

was logged or had once been pasture. In addition, the men who perform this service sometimes require that the work be done at night to avoid the possibility of neighbors identifying them and reporting them to the authorities. This means the ideal land choice was pasture, former pasture, or logged forest. Some Gaúchos have purchased and consolidated properties adjacent to the main roads leading to Santarém (Figure 5.3). Access to a reliable roadway is an obvious advantage, and in most cases this land had been in use, lowering the cost for preparation. Land that had been in use usually included housing, as well. The next best choice was to purchase land that was far from the main roads. This second region includes many properties that were heavily forested. Why did they choose heavily forested lands far from the city? Land closer to the city and along secondary roadways was already settled and the properties available were usually small (less than 100 ha), making it hard to assemble a parcel of land large enough for an adequate economy of scale to support the cost of the equipment needed to run a mechanized operation. A second problem in the intermediate-distance was that the small-scale farmers and rural communities in this area were concerned about the arrival of Gaúchos, and were more likely to report deforestation (these issues are discussed more fully in Chapter 7). The Gaúchos saw this intermediate zone as an unwelcoming place to establish a farm. Another reason Gaúchos bought distant or isolated land was that forest clearing could be concealed and the few neighbors would be less likely to report this activity. Land along the periphery of the agricultural zone outside Santarém appears to be forested in satellite images prior to 1997. When I asked, the farmers claimed their land was previously an

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overgrown cattle ranch that had been abandoned after the collapse of the jute industry. Regrowth can appear as mature forest 20–25 years after it has ceased being kept “clean” (free from regrowth). Land that has grown back as forest is often called “degraded” forest locally, but there is evidence that these forests are biologically rich and from an ecological perspective are not less important than mature forest (Brondízio 2005). Despite the fact that cattle ranches in the area had certainly been abandoned, earlier aerial photos suggest that the land was forested even then.

Figure 5.3. A former smallholder farmstead, now owned by a large-scale farmer.

While farmers I spoke with expressed that it is better to sell their land in the South or Central West outright, some of them were only able to sell their land in the South or Central West on a contract. Two farmers mentioned a payment schedule that appeared to be somewhat standard: three payments per year are provided, timed to the agricultural cycle.

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Farmers preferred to sell outright because if the contracted farmer fails, the payments may stop and the seller has to return to the former farm to deal with the legal and social issues that arise from the failed contract and potentially damaged farm. All the contracts that were described to me were from farms that had been sold in the Central West, although the farmers were unwilling to provide any specifics related to payment amounts. If the farmers are not able to sell their land outright, or sell the land on contract, there is a third option. Poorer farmers can sell to a larger neighbor in Mato Grosso and accept land in Santarém in exchange. This arrangement is sometimes made through a direct trade of land titles. This allows the larger farmers in Mato Grosso to expand their operations. Although the new farm in Santarém is usually larger than the one in the Central West, there are many risks for the farmers migrating to Santarém that would not be present in the Central West. The foremost risk is that land titling in Santarém is quite uncertain. An agent at INCRA told me that the area of land titled in Santarém is twice as large as the area referenced. This indicates that on average there are at least two titles for every property. The land farmers buy may be smaller than promised, because the title is valid for only part of the land, or worse, the land may not belong to the seller at all. A farmer with adequate capital will avoid these conflicts by using a land agent or paying a premium to procure land with a clear title. The Gaúchos who are embroiled in conflict with local communities over land rights and boundaries are often the least sophisticated and most vulnerable of the migrants. There are several other risks related to the land in Santarém that may make this direct property exchange less equitable than it would seem to an unsuspecting farmer. Promotional materials indicated excellent topography and soil conditions in Santarém, but

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there are areas around Santarém where this is not the case. Marcos Caruso, a Gaúcho who moved to Santarém using a direct exchange of properties was very disappointed that the property he acquired was steeply sloped instead of flat. Farmers were also concerned about the quality of the roads providing access to their farms. In some places the roads were impassable during the wet season and when a bridge collapsed. The farmers need to get heavy equipment onto their properties and haul away harvested crops, so they are vulnerable to weakness in the transportation infrastructure. Acquiring property by trading directly carries a risk that you will receive a farm located in an area susceptible to these troubles with transportation. The farmers were less concerned about the variable soil conditions, because there are methods and materials available to correct any deficiencies, although the cost of these corrections can be high depending on the initial quality. As the farmers bought land that was well suited to their needs and land values increased, there was a growing need for both land agents and “facilitators” to work with IBAMA and INCRA (Figure 5.4). The land agents were especially important and served as both real estate agents and cultural brokers for those not familiar with the distinctive aspects of acquiring land in the Amazon region. The land agents I met were professional, well respected and generally avoided any illegal activities, which could be disastrous for their long-term business plan.

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Figure 5.4. A local land agent in Santarém. The facilitators hired by farmers were former employees of, or closely related to IBAMA and INCRA leadership. They charged a fee to pursue a request for a clear title to land, a land claim, or a request for permission to clear the land for planting. These processes are often complicated. The farmers often complained about how long these things took and how inefficient the process was. Note the frustration and the sense of being victimized by a hopeless bureaucracy in this example from one of my interviews: Farmer: You need a piece of land for planting in order to make it as a farmer, since that is your only means of getting by. You have a piece of land, only you don’t have a document. What are you going to do? You need to plant this land. In order to grow, you have to deforest, but the law requires you to leave at least 80% of your land as a reservation in this region. Okay . . . then I will prepare my

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20%. Okay, but for the money you have to get a loan from the bank, and the bank requires you to document the land. Right? Me: Right Farmer: Fine, but I have no document. So, I go to INCRA to ask them for the land title if it is vacant land. I want to resolve it right away, but INCRA enters a process, and it will only release the documents in three or four years. How are you going to survive three or four years? Then you need to clear the forest, so you inform IBAMA [Figure 5.5] that you will be deforesting the 20% you are allowed. IBAMA will not give you permission to open up the 20% even if it is legal, even when you are entitled to under the law. Because IBAMA doesn’t . . ., first, you have to have the legal title, so one thing gets in the way of the other and where does that leave you!? Having to work illegally, so you start clearing because you have to work, but then here comes IBAMA. They fine you and that is how this mess all starts. Because the farmers need to limit the amount of time between the end of their farming period elsewhere and the beginning of their farming activities in Santarém, delays due to paperwork are potentially very disruptive. Delays cause the farmers and their families to live on their savings (if they have savings) or to go further into debt while they wait until their paperwork is ready.

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Figure 5.5. The waiting area of the IBAMA office. This waiting area was very familiar to nearly all the landowners I spoke with.

Expenses and Costs Even if farmers are able to get the documents they need immediately and begin preparing their farms shortly thereafter, most will acquire significant debt in outfitting their new farms in Santarém and building the necessary infrastructure. A tractor and a harvester were fairly standard at about $80,000 and $240,000, respectively. Some of the farmers need several harvesters due to the volume of ripe soy or rice at harvest time. Farmers had used rental equipment in the South and Central West to cope with the need for additional equipment, but there were not many options for renting equipment in Santarém. 110

In addition to equipment costs, farmers lamented the lack of availability of both parts and skilled mechanics. The parts suppliers in Santarém operated with exceptionally narrow overheads and refused to stock expensive parts, as that would require a larger investment in their stock than they were willing to make. The time required to order and wait for a part to arrive was a major concern for farmers. The skill level of mechanics improved dramatically during the year I was in the field, when mechanics arrived from the Central West and local workers were trained. The farmers were frustrated with the expense involved in hiring unskilled workers and training them, but mentioned the positive effect of providing new skills to workers in Santarém as a contribution they were making to the community. The lack of available parts and trained local labor were minor shortcomings in the eyes of the Gaúchos. The farmers initially encountered a very poor infrastructure for agriculturerelated products and services in Santarém. There were few construction, machinery sales, grain processing and storage, and agricultural input businesses. Seed, fertilizer, manure, and agrochemicals were hard to find. The absence of trained labor extended beyond the need for mechanics, and farmers had to hire workers from outside the region for virtually all farm work. They often brought workers with them from the Central West when they relocated to Santarém. The transition from workers brought in from former agricultural frontiers to local workers was underway during my fieldwork, however. During interviews, several farmers introduced me to local workers who had jobs formerly performed by workers from the Central West, and I encountered a few examples of workers from the Central West looking for work after having been replaced by cheaper local labor.

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In addition to tractors, harvesters and labor investments, farmers constructed or purchased equipment sheds, silos to store grain, and soil corrections and amendments. Most farmers hired a consultant service to perform tests on their soil and oversee the corrections and additions. The consulting service, testing, and corrections were a considerable up-front expense but a wise investment long-term. The primary correction was to add lime to the soil to bind aluminum and reduce acidity. The cost of lime is much higher in Santarém than in the South. My informants reported prices in the range of R$120/ton compared to R$ 40/ton in Paraná. The farmers justify their initial level of debt because prices for agricultural commodities are rising and there is increasing government and corporate investment in infrastructure. The appropriate size of a farm and how much credit a farmer should take out in order to create or expand his operation is difficult to judge, and it is one of the key decisions that can determine farm success or failure (as in the American context, Barlett 1993). In Santarém, many Gaúchos arrived without adequate savings and credit, but with high hopes. They were overextended financially, and when the grain market bubble burst in 2005, many were left with low margins, high levels of debt, and poor credit. They faced an aggressive campaign against illegal deforestation (more about this movement in Chapter 7). They were very concerned about their levels of debt, although they were never willing to share exact figures. The handful of Gaúchos who arrived with deep capital reserves are now well positioned to buy up or rent the properties of farmers who have overextended, creating a very concentrated landownership group and a two-tiered class of large-scale farmers.

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Unfortunately, when the price of soybeans and rice declined in 2005, debt quickly became unmanageable for many farmers (Figure 5.6). There is a chasm between the public exaltation of the farmer as a daring swashbuckling entrepreneur and the frustrated contract farmer who has received fertilizer from Cargill on the promise that he will deliver a certain quantity of the crop by a deadline or suffer default. The truth is that, except for the very largest farm producers, these are but different portraits of the same person. (Fisher 2007, p. 354) Some of the farmers in Santarém had to quit farming and rent their land out to their more fortunate neighbors because they were unable to afford the cost of planting. In a few cases, their problems were related to the failure of the farmers contracted on their former farms in the Central West (this could potentially also be true of a farm in the South, but I never heard of such a case) to provide their arranged payments. Without this money they were not able to plant in Santarém. For those who wanted to get out of farming in such bad economic times, the unattractive grain markets often meant that they were not able to sell their land for the price they had paid. I spoke to a few farmers who wanted to leave after only a year or two in the region. Even though the cost of planting, maintaining, and harvesting a crop of rice or soy was likely to be higher than the crop could bring in, many farmers chose to continue planting. As we sat drinking strong, sweet Brazilian coffee next to a wall covered in signs offering farm equipment and land for sale, one farmer explained his decision to plant even though he had calculated that at current prices he would lose money, “You can’t just sit around. You have to farm, because it is in your blood.”

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Figure 5.6. A repossessed tractor for sale at a local tractor dealership.

If the farmers arrive with their families, their accepted standard of living generally means that they will need to make a substantial upgrade in the housing and household infrastructure. Gaúchos arriving in Santarém think of running water, reliable electricity, and modern appliances as basic necessities although they are only rarely found on the rural properties they buy. Many farmers delayed these expenses by arriving a year ahead of their families and living without the upgrades. The men pride themselves on needing fewer amenities than their wives and children, but they are hesitant to have their wives and children live without basic household necessities. Most still have farms that are not

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upgraded to these standards and rent a home in the city for their families. Whether they rented a place in the city or upgraded their rural property, the farmers needed to purchase the kinds of goods they were used to having in their homes. Some of the farmers were disappointed in the lack of retail establishments in Santarém, without car dealers stocking newer-model pickup trucks, good barbeque restaurants, modern department stores, and middle-class home furnishings. This was aggravating, but not discouraging (see Figure 5.7 for a view of the long line waiting to enter a bank building under construction). As I noted earlier, they believe their arrival will create demand for new businesses and usher in a more sophisticated and modern way of life. The Gaúchos arrived with a clear idea of the future of the Amazon, based on their experiences in the South and Central West. Farmers felt pushed out of those areas due to inheritance practices that favored passing the family farm to the oldest son, the lack of affordable options for farm expansion, pride in increasing the national trade balance through agricultural expansion, the cultural value associated with pioneering a new area and the pride of modernizing unproductive areas in Brazil. Their sense of pride in the progress that they brought to new areas and their negative view of Santarém as a “backward” place in need of improvement were seen as arrogance by some local large-scale landowners, even though the local elite favored modernization and economic growth, as well. I will discuss the local landowners’ efforts to bring about development through mechanized agriculture next.

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Figure 5.7. The unsightly construction at the main branch of the Bank of Brazil was referred to emblematically as an example of “development” by the local landowners and as an example of the lack of “modern” facilities by arriving farmers.

“Pull” Factors: The Local Elite Invite Mechanized Agriculture Why was Santarém a “magnet” for Gaúchos? The region was developing local agricultural experiments, boosters were packaging and disseminating the results of these experiments, land-use planning was being organized through an agroecological zoning project, and Cargill built a soybean shipping terminal in Santarém. I expected local landowners to view the arrival of mechanized agriculture as an unwelcome development that would compete

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with their land uses and business activities. News stories, conversations with researchers who were familiar with the area, interviews with landowners during my preliminary fieldwork in 2003, and fact that not a single local large-scale landowner was growing rice or soy all suggested this was an unwelcome development. However, when I asked one of the leaders of the Santarém Rural Union about the local, large-scale landowners’ perceptions of the arrival of mechanized agriculture and the Gaúchos, his response was as simple as it was telling: “It is our dream.” He went on to explain how the local elite had worked hard to make Santarém well suited to mechanized agriculture.

Early Experiments2 Mechanized agriculture in the Amazon basin was not seen as likely to succeed by agronomists due to the heat, the poor infrastructure to transport crops and the lack of available input and equipment dealers (Fearnside 2001). Some farmers attempted to grow rice or soy anyway. Farmers in Santarém were more interested in experimentation than I had suspected. Several mentioned using of a corner of their property to test local fruit production or crops, even those that they were told were unlikely to be viable. In 1989, using the natural, downward slope of the levee on his floodplain property near Santarém, José Mayer, a landowner known for his experimental approach to agriculture and aggressive pursuit of new opportunities installed a pump and a homemade irrigation system and planted rice. In Figure 5.8, the location indicated by “Floating Vegetation” in the top transect was the location of his plot, during the dry season (corresponding to the “min” 2

It was not clear to me whether these early experiments used harvesters, or simply tractors with attached equipment. 117

water level). He installed irrigation equipment located along the peak of the “Restinga” and flowing downslope across his crops. Mr. Mayer corresponds in many ways to Cancian’s (1979) “early adopter.” He was a socially marginal figure despite his occasional dramatic successes (and dramatic failures). This particular experiment was quite successful.

Source: McGrath et al. 1993, p.171 Figure 5.8. Amazon River floodplain cross-section showing levee slope. Mr. Mayer conducted another experiment in 1992 on his upland property along the CuruáUna highway. The soybeans grown there reportedly yielded a low 180 kg/ha. A third rowcrop experiment, with soybeans again, was conducted in 1993. Tony Ramos set aside part of his cattle ranch along the Santarém-Cuiabá highway and prepared it for cultivation using 118

seed he had purchased in Maranhão. His preparation methods and planting techniques were never published, but it is unlikely he was able to provide inputs beyond those that he could have purchased locally. His colleagues claim that his soybean crop yielded 6,000 kg/ha, although this landowner was distrustful of foreigners and would not consent to an interview. This high yield generated interest locally and was used by politicians and members of the local elite to show that soybean cultivation and mechanized agriculture were potentially lucrative in Santarém. Soy yields are sensitive to small changes in timing and soil correction techniques. I was told that the reason Mr. Mayer’s second experiment had a low yield was his inexperience with field crops and lack of formal knowledge. Mr. Ramos, on the other hand, was said to have had previous experience growing soybeans, although he had been a cattle rancher for many years by that point.

Government Support The transition from the early, independent farmers’ experiments to efforts supported by the government came in several stages. In 1995, the governor of Pará attended an agrofair in the South and became convinced that large-scale rice had a future in the floodplain region of the Amazon. He sent technicians from Embrapa to study the potential of the Santarém region for mechanized rice agriculture. In Santarém, these technicians learned about the experiments and the local support for the development of mechanized agriculture. In the following year (1996), a representative of the Secretary of Agriculture for the state of Pará, who is now involved in management at the Cargill facilities in Santarém, went to Santarém as one of four agricultural technicians to conduct an official 119

experiment involving the production of soy alone and in rotation with rice, millet, and corn. Mr. Mayer and another local landowner funded this experiment, which was officially coordinated through the Brazilian government (Ministry for the Environment, Ministry for Hydrological Resources, and Legal Amazon) and the state of Pará (through the Secretary of Hydrological Resources and the Secretary of Agriculture). The soy yields from this experiment were close to 3,000 kg/ha for several varieties of soy, and these positive results (Table 5.1) were received enthusiastically by everyone involved in the project (Severino 1997). The yields from the other crops were not published, as the study was designed to demonstrate the viability of soy in Santarém. Table 5.1. Evaluation of experimental soybean plots. Plot Number 01

Planting Date

Variety

1/27–28 Doko – RC

Productivity/Harvest (kg/ha)

Area (ha)

Plants

Depth

Manual

Mechanical

Final Population (plants/ha)

5.9

30

10–12

32

102

1,971

540

104,662

Height (cm)

Maturity Cycle (days) (days)

02

2/2

Doko – RC

2.8

40

12–15

32

101

2,659

1,726

221,333

03

2/2

Seridó

4.1

85

19

52

127

3,323

3,141

516,000

04

2/25–26

V.R. Doce

10.2

80

18

40

110

3,217

2,898

426,250

05

2/26

Bays

1.5

90

20

45

123

3,427

3,208

398,250

06

3/23–24

Bays

12.3

90

21

45

115

2,285

2,026

445,555

07a

3/25

V.R. Doce

4.6

90

20

40

100

3,048

2,718

409,555

08

3/25

V.R. Doce

1.6

75

17

39

100

2,809

2,479

424,500

09

4/2

V.R. Doce

2.9

80

17

39

103

2,305

2,056

459,722

10

4/14

Seridó

1.0

80

20

46

113

1,390

1,219

280,833

11

4/19

Mirador

0.5

50

14

35

92

1,448

900

362,222

12

5/5

V.R. Doce

2.0

58

14

39

102

957

627

119,999

Total

49.4

a 500 kg of fertilizer per hectare

The report produced from this study put forward a number of important ideas that were to prove very influential in establishing a narrative that legitimized and supported the

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development of mechanized agriculture. In the introduction, the authors suggest that the land around Santarém has nearly 600,000 ha of “altered areas, considered to be areas that were already deforested and later abandoned or transformed into poorly managed pasture” (Severino 1997, p. 1). Much of the text explains that the region is well suited to mechanized agriculture. “It seems obvious now that it is perfectly possible to produce soybeans in the Santarém region, with levels of productivity and profitability equal or superior to the country’s traditional growing regions” (Severino 1997, p. 19). The impact of these early figures and claims should not be underestimated as they were prominently featured in the material that was circulated among farmers in the South and Central West. Boosters for mechanized agriculture in Santarém combined the results from this experiment with climate data, soil classification data, and an agroecological zoning reporting the large area of land available in Santarém and assembled these on a CD. The CD was sent to agricultural fairs throughout the Central West and the South to advertise the suitability of Santarém for mechanized agriculture.

Promoting Mechanized Agriculture and Disseminating Results During an Agrofair I attended in Rio Grande do Sul in 2005, farmers from the South still remembered the promotional materials and positive projections of the agricultural potential of Santarém. They assumed that the government produced the CD as part of a continuing effort to settle and develop the Amazon. The CD was actually put together by leading members of the Rural Union, although Embrapa was featured on the cover, since Embrapa data was included. The men who had assembled the CD produced it to alleviate 121

fears about the suitability of soybeans to the environment and soils of Santarém. The data included information about the volume and regularity of rainfall, the incidence of disease, and soil properties. Estimates of degraded land suitable for planting were also included, as an indicator of “available land.” This is an important element in the report with implications for the current debate about soy in the Amazon. “Available land” was defined as any land that met basic biophysical conditions, and had been cleared at some point in the past. An agroecological zoning project produced in 1998 run by Embrapa describes their standards as follows: The classification of agricultural suitability is based on the placement of land into six categories, which are intended to show alternative land uses for particular pieces of land, depending on the feasibility of improving the basic qualities of the land and the limitations with the agricultural practices found in the various systems of management, using three levels of technology (low technology - management system A; average technology - management system B; high technology - management system C). (Embrapa 1998, p. 27) The report found that each category of land is “well suited” to high technology, while only “suitable” for average technology and “poorly suited” to low technology (together this area is just over 500,000 ha), and a smaller area of land is considered to be unsuitable for agriculture (Table 5.2). It is interesting to note that the study finds that on land “suitable for agriculture” higher levels of technology are always better. This is a direct contrast to research showing that low technology methods can be very productive in the Amazon (Brondízio 2006, 2008). The underlying assumption of the desirability of high-technology

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agriculture can provide a justification for supporters of mechanized agriculture in a landscape that was once dominated by small-scale household farmers using lowtechnology methods. Table 5.2. Classification of land in Santarém according to the level of technology that should be employed by the producers. Symbol of the Agricultural Class

Area

Technical Definition

ha

%

1 (a)bC

Land that is well suited to management system C, suitable for management system B, and poorly suited to management system A.

502,710.60

70,88

1 (a)bC

Land that is well suited to management system C, suitable for management system B, and poorly suited to management system A.

13,281.25

1,87

2 (a)bc

Land that is suitable for management system B and C, and poorly suited to management system A.

9,363.07

1,32

6

Land that is not suitable for agriculture.

170,295.28

24,02

6

Land that is not suitable for agriculture.

13,587.96

1,92

Source: Adapted from Embrapa 1998, p. 46.

As I mentioned previously, the land area “available” for development was an important element in the promotion of mechanized farming in Amazonia. While earlier soybean experiments had included an estimate of 600,000 ha, the more common figure used during my fieldwork was the Embrapa figure (550,000 ha). Steward (2007, p. 113) notes the same consistency in the use of this figure when discussing agribusiness in Santarém: Agribusiness discourses of soy development echo those of the Brazilian local and national government[s]. A clear example of this mirroring effect occurred when agribusiness soy actors were asked the following question: 123

‘‘What is Santarém’s soy production potential?’’ The majority of agribusiness soy actors replied that the area’s potential is 550,000 ha. The consistency of their reply is not coincidental, but a verbatim figure from the EMBRAPA/PRIMAZ agro-ecological zoning map that identifies land-use potential for the municipality (i.e., a future land-use scenario for the region). It is important to consider the accuracy of “available land” in terms of how that land is defined and the size of the land in question. Should forested land be considered “available”? This issue lies at the heart of debates about the future of the Amazon. This study does not consider the possibility that forested land near Santarém would remain forested. To agriculture boosters, forested land in a convenient location is simply land that has not yet been developed. On the contrary, to those who were working in the area to prevent deforestation, all land with forest is considered “forest.” In Santarém, forested land includes some areas that could be considered primary forest but the vast majority of land with forest has previously been logged or cleared. In the language of the pro-development position, the latter areas represent “degraded” land, not forest. This important work establishing the terms of the debate about land use set the stage for the expansion of agribusiness in Santarém.

Agribusiness Agribusiness interest in the Amazon also attracted new farmers. During the early 1990s, the largest soybean operation in Mato Grosso, led by Grupo Maggi, sought to reduce the cost of transporting its crops from the Central West to the port facilities in the Southeast. 124

One alternative route involved constructing a grain terminal in Santarém, taking advantage of a public-private plan to pave the Cuiabá-Santarém highway (BR-163) (Figure 5.9). The plan to pave BR-163 fell through due to political pressure related to concerns with the environmental and social impacts of improved access to the Amazon, and Grupo Maggi decided to focus instead on building a facility in Itacoatiara, a bit further upstream from Santarém (Lazzarini and Filho 1997). That facility was constructed and presently serves as a port facility to ship soybeans grown in Mato Grosso to the Cargill facility in Santarém by barge. At the same time, Cargill was exploring the region. Some of my informants speculated that the interest demonstrated by Cargill may have been driven in part by Grupo Maggi’s strong ties to Bunge, one of Cargill’s main competitors. Cargill made a decision to move ahead with the port facility in Santarém, and both the state and local governments celebrated this decision. Agriculture development boosters who had sponsored the soybean experimental plot and promotional activities mentioned previously felt validated by Cargill’s decision. They had hoped to show that Santarém is a place that is friendly toward agribusiness (Steward 2007).

Cargill In 2000, Cargill began to build a shipping facility at the port in Santarém. Soybeans shipped from the new port facility would arrive in Singapore or Rotterdam at a reduced cost relative to soybeans shipped from facilities in the Southeast (Figure 5.10).

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Figure 5.9. Cargill facility built in Santarém.

Source: Adapted from a 2005 IPAM figure. Figure 5.10. The cost savings for shipping soy from the Central West to Rotterdam via Santarém vs. Southeast Brazil ($12/ton) and from the Central West to Shanghai via Santarém vs. Southeast Brazil ($10/ton).

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There is little doubt that Cargill is a globalizing force in the Amazon. Founded in 1865 and headquartered in Minneapolis, MN, Cargill is ranked as America’s largest privately held company by Forbes Magazine (Reifman and Murphy 2008). With over $66 billion in revenue and 124,000 employees in 60 countries, Cargill sells food, agricultural, and riskmanagement products and services. Cargill produces and distributes crop nutrients and feed ingredients to farmers, livestock producers, and animal feeders. The company also processes grain, oilseeds, and other agricultural commodities. In Santarém, Cargill established a deep-water port and grain terminal capable of receiving the large oceangoing Panamax vessels of between 60,000 DWT and 100,000 DWT (Cargill 2000, 2005). The facility increased its exports every year, from 14,000 tons in 2003 to 28,000 tons in 2004, and 40,000 tons in 2005. It expected to export 80,000 tons in 2006 (Gilmar Tirapelle, interview at Cargill Santarém Facility, October 18, 2005). Cargill is the exclusive buyer of all soybeans produced in the region, although according to Tirapelle, the agricultural region around Santarém accounts for less than 20% of the soybeans that are exported from the port. The remainder must be shipped in from further south, primarily from Mato Grosso, arriving by barge via the Grupo Maggi facility in Itacoatiara. Cargill’s arrival in Santarém allowed for stronger economic connections to be made between Santarém and export markets. The soybean container ships leaving from Santarém traveled almost exclusively to the two largest ports in the world, Rotterdam and Singapore. A more direct link to global agribusiness could scarcely be imagined. Proponents of agribusiness in Santarém see this globally connected agricultural production system as a more sustainable economic arrangement than the previous local agricultural system, despite the history of volatility in commodity markets. “A Cargill soy buyer 127

explained that agro-industrial development provides a more stable foundation for economic development (than previous development projects) because it is linked to the global agricultural market where soy has great product versatility and a lucrative world price” (Steward 2007, p. 113). Boosters of agroindustrial development in Santarém hope that the connection to a reliable source of income for Santarém and Brazil will outweigh the risk of a collapse in the global soybean market.

Gaúchos An interesting aspect of the globalization of agribusiness in Santarém is the strong cultural connection between the management of the Cargill facilities and the Gaúcho farmers. The managers and senior personnel at Cargill in Santarém are also “Gaúchos” in the local classification, and are trusted and respected by farmers. They have similar class standing and family histories and share a common identity. The manager of Cargill has a history of involvement in the development of agriculture in Santarém. He was part of the experiment that established the feasibility of growing soybeans in the region and supported the later efforts to form a cooperative (a central topic addressed in Chapter 7), although, due to his position in Cargill, he was not able to be officially involved. Brewster Kneen (2002) has documented how Cargill tries to be flexible in establishing a local identity that is well suited to the cultural conditions, attempting to use locally recognized brands in each area where it operates, and contributing to the community to improve its local image. The connection between Cargill managers and Gaúcho farmers is a strong example of this philosophy in action in Santarém. 128

Summary Multiple forces drive the expansion of mechanized agriculture in Santarém. Previous theories suggest that the expansion of capitalism into frontier regions results in the emergence of more capital-intensive and globalized commodity farming. In this chapter I suggest that the cultural identity of Gaúcho farmers migrating into the area is significant in explaining this expansion as well. Specifically, the farmers’ interest in economic development and sense of pride in participating in prior periods of economic growth related to mechanized agriculture combined with their ethnic and national identities lead them to see the expansion of mechanized agriculture as a positive and noble pursuit. The pro-development attitude may be a Brazilian trait, but the Gaúchos are the leaders of this effort, modern day bandeirantes. The way in which the Gaúchos establish a farm produces a particular set of conditions in Santarém that shape the impact mechanized agriculture has on the region. There is a range of personal wealth among the arriving farmers and many of them are in a precarious position and have pushed the limits of their finances to acquire the largest possible area of land and establish a farm that is recognizable as having the “necessary” elements. The Gaúchos moving into the area are not alone in shaping the development of mechanized agriculture in Santarém. The local elite conducted experiments which provided evidence of the potential of mechanized agriculture. The local elite reported on these experiments and the conditions of the area in a particular way, including claims about “available land,” that highlighted the potential of the area as a site well suited to the expansion of mechanized 129

agriculture. Finally, despite landowner reluctance to mention Cargill as a motivation for them to relocate to Santarém, it should not be underestimated how important the presence of Cargill in the area was for the development of mechanized agriculture. These factors all shaped the arrival of mechanized agriculture. While mechanized agriculture is becoming a dominant feature of the economy, it is important to remember that farming exists within a larger economic context in Santarém. The local large-scale landowners who were in place prior to the arrival of the Gaúchos continue to have an important role. Their activities have been shaped by the arrival of mechanized agriculture, but have not been replaced by it. I analyze the role of the local elite and their adaptations to the arrival of mechanized agriculture in the following chapter.

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Chapter 6 Local Elite in Santarém – Strategies for Building and Maintaining Wealth

Introduction As I described in Chapter 5, the local elite worked to realize local participation in the mechanized agriculture economy. In order to understand how they looked at opportunities and risks in the economy and how they reacted to the arrival of the Gaúchos, it is necessary to see how their economic history helped shape these reactions and led them to the moment when mechanized agriculture was becoming a dominant part of the local economy. All of the local large-scale landowners are men, with a single exception (a female rancher and veterinarian). The history of these men provides the context for their attitudes and decisions, including their reaction to the arrival of mechanized agriculture. It is important to emphasize that the economic behavior of the local elite has been driven by factors other than economic opportunity. Their choices are not simply reactions to costs and benefits, but fall in line with their social identity. Their identity is related, in part, to their economic activities and the wealth they have gained through those activities, but it is also driven by the long-term relationships they have had with their less well-off neighbors, customers, and employees. The local elite are not just businessmen, but also patrons, with time-consuming and resource-draining responsibilities. Their position was justified to me in their descriptions of their role in Santarém society by portraying themselves as selfmade and frugal entrepreneurs. 131

They construct an identity as a socially responsible patron and a hard-working entrepreneur. These values are demonstrated through their actions and decisions. This is done by employing the lower classes, involving their workers in activities they are engaged in, demonstrating their own ability to perform labor and work long hours, fulfilling family responsibilities, supporting efforts to diversify within their families, building wealth carefully and without putting too much of their family’s position at risk for any one venture.

How the Local Elite Gained Their Position: Kinship and Cautious Investments The local elite, like their counterparts in the rest of Brazil, have a bilateral kinship system with neolocal residence and a kindred extending multiple generations. It is not remarkably divergent from most western societies, although the kindred is larger than an American nuclear family. Gilberto Freyre (1946) and Charles Wagley (1953) noted a half-century ago that the kindred (Parentela) rather than the individual or association through work is the central focus of identity in Brazil. This is still true for elite families in Santarém. Important families in Santarém also use godparenthood (compadrio) to strengthen connections among elite families or as a connection between patrons and clients. The interclass connections functioned much like Wagley (1953, p. 191)described for Brazil as a whole in 1953: “More important members of the lower class invited individuals of large and powerful upper-class families to serve as godparents to their children, thus linking themselves and the godchild in a pseudokin relation to such groups.”

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The local elite families have taken advantage of periodic episodes of economic growth and decline to raise their social status and economic position. They have done this through diversifying the economic activities of kin members. The local elite generally wait to enter a new economic arena until the initial speculators have revealed the pitfalls and best practices. They may begin by investing in industries that are secondary to the new economic arena as a way to build social connections in the new arena and learn important information about the industry. Maintaining a diversity of economic activities within a family is a good way to reduce risk. If any one industry or part of the economy declines or encounters legal obstacles, the losses are distributed and buffered. This diversity is made possible within a family network due to a degree of mutual support. Those who have done well are expected to provide support to those who have fallen on hard times. They are expected to provide jobs or invest in their relatives’ business ventures. They are also expected to buy things that are used by extended kin, distributing their wealth. For example, during fieldwork (Figure 6.1), I saw farmers hiring relatives even in jobs that they were not well qualified for, investing in a nephew’s business venture, despite doubt that the venture would be successful, hosting family and work parties during holidays, contributing to community events (parades, carnival floats, etc.), providing housing for retired parents, and mentoring nieces and nephews. Not all of these are remarkable within Western families and Brazilians, but the degree of support and frequency of requests was far greater than I was used to seeing in an American context.

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Figure 6.1. The author with a local landowner who actively diversifies his operation throughout his kinship network. The landowner’s father and children specialized in areas of the farm enterprise. Spreading the economic activities throughout the kinship network provides another advantage. When new economic opportunities emerge or advantages shift between economic sectors, the family with a diversity of occupations is more likely to have someone well positioned to take advantage. I saw this with one of the local families. Changes in the livestock industry following the arrival of mechanized agriculture created a new opportunity for veterinarians who were trained in artificial insemination, and this family had a member who was prepared because they had invested in her education. Besides spreading the risks within the kinship network, the local elite also approach new opportunities carefully and slowly. Although the first farmers to use mechanized techniques in Santarém had arrived more than five years earlier, during my fieldwork the first of the local elite to enter this arena were just starting to buy equipment and prepare fields. In this way, the local elite are similar to the upper-middle class in Cancian’s (1967) 134

study of technology adoption. Cancian pointed out that the upper-middle-class farmer will adopt technology more cautiously than expected due to the risk of losing social status if the new technology turns out to be less profitable than expected (Cancian 1967). The loss of prestige in moving from upper-middle to lower-middle class is substantial. Cancian (1976) also noted that the same class moves aggressively in the “second phase” after profitability is established. The local history of boom-and-bust cycles (e.g., turtle eggs, jute, cacao) makes this kind of caution, given the fact that some economies (such as rubber and jute) collapsed very rapidly. This caution is not inaction. Most of the local elite families had strong connections with the mechanized agriculture industry through related activities. Examples included sales of equipment, brokering land sales, operating grain storage or processing facilities, packaging and selling crops, and retail agribusinesses. Because they spent time with the farmers in these enterprises, they developed relationships with them and became familiar with their approaches, techniques, and ideas. Through their investments in related industries, they were able to realize gains without full exposure to risks. The caution and other tactics used by the local elite were developed though the experience of several historical phases and need to be understood in the context of those phases.

The Economic History of the Santarém Elite Santarém is located across the river from the site of a large prehistoric settlement (Roosevelt 1996). The city formed around a Jesuit mission that was elevated to the status of a town in 1758. Nugent’s (1993) ethnography of Santarém traces the history of the 135

landowning elite in the area, beginning with the Church, military, and government bureaucrats. This early colonial elite was partially replaced during the rubber boom by a class of merchants using a credit-extension practice (aviamento) to establish themselves as sellers and purchasers for products traded by the big firms in Manaus and Belém. In this system, goods and credit were extended at the beginning of the growing season in exchange for exclusive rights to buy the product. This system established a hierarchy of control and power, with the large firms in the big cities at the top of the hierarchy. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, shop owners and transportation firms in Santarém worked with these larger firms to establish a local market for imports and to control the export of local products, like rubber, brazil nuts, spices and natural dyes. The use of debt to control the labor of rubber tappers and others who sold forest products to the merchants for export was a central element of this economy (Weinstein 1983). The families who owned shops and transportation firms claimed descent from the Portuguese, and later absorbed immigrants who had fled the North American Confederacy following the Civil War, a group referred to locally as Confederados (Confederates) (Guilhon 1979). The Confederates were given a large piece of land by the Brazilian government, part of which is still intact today and is owned by one of the more influential families in Santarém, the Lees. They can trace their lineage back to the Confederate immigrants and are proud of this heritage, but the story of the Confederate immigration is no longer well remembered by most people in Santarém.

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Early Booms: Turtle Eggs and Cacao In the 18th and 19th centuries there was a boom economy in the region based on harvesting turtle eggs for use as a source of oil for fuel, or as food (Smith 1979). The Confederates were important players in the next economic boom cacao. When they arrived, there were abundant cacao groves all along the floodplain of the Amazon River near Santarém and the city prospered from the export of cacao. The Lee family began by planting cacao on the land granted to them by Brazil. They gained control over a significant part of the cacao market after the flood of 1855 spared their plantation, but destroyed much of the other cacao (WinklerPrins 2006). The Confederates brought equipment and machinery that were new to the area and invested in a number of trades, including boat manufacturing and repair. There is a considerable amount of pride locally among descendants of Confederates (Figure 6.2), and the notion that Confederates are innovative and entrepreneurial, remaining at the forefront of technology, is an important part of their local identity. The Lees established themselves in boat repair and then automobiles, because some of them traveled to Detroit for training as mechanics due to their association with local projects initiated by Henry Ford (Guilhon 1979). [Robert Lee], still vigorous at age seventy-five, worked as an interpreter and even supervised some of the operations . . . [at the Fordlândia rubber plantation]. His three sons, too, were given jobs that they kept when they followed the Ford Company back to Detroit. (Dawsey and Dawsey 1995, p. 170).

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The family continues to be important in agriculture, transportation and technology. Fabian Lee, for instance, was an important local government official in Santarém during my fieldwork. Despite his prominent role in local government, he continued to see himself primarily as a pilot. He maintained a central identity that is strongly related to the family’s involvement in technology, transportation, and agriculture.

Source: J. Oliveira 2007 Figure 6.2. Example of the continuing sense of identification among Confederate descendants in Santarém.

Rubber Ford’s rubber plantation projects at Belterra, near Santarém, and Fordlândia, 100 km away, were established as the cacao industry was waning. This next phase in the economy was related to collecting and processing rubber. The rubber boom had been going on for some time in other parts of the Amazon. Henry Ford’s decision to plant rubber along the Tapajós River had important consequences for the local elite. Fordlândia, the initial plantation upstream from Santarém, failed for many reasons. The rubber trees did not produce well

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under a plantation system, and problems were related to the consequences of monocropping a native plant in an environment where the pests and diseases that prey on the rubber trees are able to thrive (Grandin 2009). One element that contributed to the decline of the project was the social conflict between local workers and American managers, who were intent on a cultural re-engineering project driven by Ford’s social goals. For example, Ford insisted on serving only brown rice and oatmeal to workers who found these foods repulsive. The workers eventually rioted when their ideas and concerns were not taken seriously. As a side note relevant to this study, Ford believed that the real prosperity of the Amazon lay in its potential as a site for large-scale mechanized farms producing soybeans (Grandin 2009). In 1933, the Brazilian government, under threat by Ford to pull up his operation and leave Brazil, agreed to exchange the land at Fordlândia for land in Belterra, an area immediately southwest of Santarém. Ford established Belterra based on the premise that the relatively higher elevation and drier conditions would reduce disease, though problems continued. There were serious problems with plant diseases, worker shortages, and high production costs, leading to Ford’s decision to pull out in 1945 with losses estimated to be around $13 million (Goulding et al. 1996). The communities that were designed by Ford to house the workers and their families remain standing, including many classically North American styles of architecture and town planning like town squares and fire hydrants. These are amusing relics to the Brazilians who still live in these settlements and in nearby communities. Several of the elite families “piggybacked” on the rubber plantation in Belterra, using the transportation infrastructure and the established marketing mechanisms for selling rubber

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to establish their own plantations nearby (in Alter do Chão, for example). They sold their rubber when the boats arrived to export Ford’s product. Because the Ford plantations always underproduced and rarely filled the boats to capacity, the additional rubber was welcomed. My informants reported that even though they could not afford to pay the same wages as the foreigners, the area workers preferred working for them because of the benefits of the patronage system, including a more flexible arrangement relative to the working conditions and more intimate relations between bosses and workers. The local elite compensated for less profitable production with lower wages based on patron-client relationships. I suspect that the workers would have preferred better pay, even with the advantages of being a client.

Jute Jute was the next important cycle, beginning in the 1930s. While the rubber boom was more significant in terms of the global economy and the economic history of the Amazon, the jute cycle was more significant for Santarém. Some families that had been heavily invested in rubber lost their social standing and family wealth and new families became established as part of the local elite through the jute economy. Jute is a plant imported from Southeast Asia that grows in marshy areas and can be processed into a durable fiber that is used in many products, the most prominent being sacks used for shipping coffee. Smallholders borrowed from Japanese immigrants to the Amazon, and planted jute throughout the floodplains around Santarém (mainly near Ituqui, east of the city center) (WinklerPrins 2006). Several of the large landowners descended from the Northeasterners, 140

who came in the 1930s’ wave of immigration, were involved in the jute industry, initially as middlemen buying jute along the floodplain and then selling it in the city, where it was shipped to Belém. Marcello Antony, whose father had migrated from the Northeast during the early phase of this economy said, “At first [my father] thought he would grow crops [in the Santarém hinterland, near Mujúi dos Campos], but he found that jute was another way [to earn a living]. Mainly, he bought jute and sold to people who sold it in Belém, where they manufactured the [sixty-kilo bulk] packaging sacks.” Mr. Antony’s wife’s family also worked in the jute industry, but they grew and harvested it, so they were another step down the economic ladder. I asked if her family had taken part in the jute economy and she replied, “We were a part of that economy. It was on a small scale and the work was all manual. My family took it, cut it, processed it in the stream, and then brought the fiber to sell here in the city.” While the husband’s father was able to rise through the social class ranks in Santarém as a middleman, his family was only able to accumulate wealth later, through cattle/land and urban investments. In this way, some merchants were eventually able to gain entry into the local elite through jute. The jute industry had important regional implications, marking the beginning of a shift from strong trade flows between the Amazon and Portugal to a stronger connection between the Amazon and southern Brazil. Trade between the Amazon and the rest of Brazil was limited by the difficulty of ocean travel along the Eastern South American coast, compared to the more favorable ocean currents for travel between the Amazon and Europe (DeWitt 2002). Prior to the period of jute production, the flow of trade tended to involve

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the shipment of unprocessed materials from the Amazon to Europe and finished goods from Europe to the primary economic centers (Rio de Janiero, São Paulo, Porto Alegre) in the South and Southeast. Jute was the catalyst for a more direct movement of goods and capital between the Amazon and the urban centers of Brazil. This was driven by a policy of import replacement. Because jute was processed into sacks that were in high demand for packaging the coffee being grown and processed in the South, the domestic market for jute was encouraged by Brazil in order to avoid dependence on British India (WinklerPrins 2006). The jute economy also operated with the patron-client, aviamento system, in which the rural communities growing the jute became clients of the merchants in Santarém, who were middlemen in the regional trade network. The relationships between patrons and clients during the rubber boom were exploitative, because the clients received less for their efforts than the credit they had been extended (Weinstein 1983; Dean 1987). My informants (who were patrons in this system) insisted that the trading relationships in the jute system were fairer for clients than other patron-client trading systems. Jute producers were not socially isolated, because jute was concentrated in the floodplains, rather than widely dispersed, as is the case with rubber trees. Merchants competed with one another to satisfy the high demand. The patrons reported that the trading relationship was controlled, primarily by the satisfaction of clients with the products or credit they received in advance of the growing season and the price of jute at the time of sale. The merchants preferred to compete with one another by offering better products when credit was extended but at times found it necessary to offer a better price for the jute. The comparatively less exploitative dynamic within the jute economy is confirmed from the client’s perspective in 142

WinklerPrins’s (2006) analysis of the jute industry. Her work, based on ethnographic interviews among the growers and their descendants, found that clients were nostalgic for the “friendly” patron-client system found in the Santarém region. “Most accepted these terms of production since it was extremely convenient and to most a very safe and comfortable situation” (WinklerPrins 2006, p. 830). The second phase of the jute economy began when a jute-processing factory was built east of the riverfront. The factory processed jute grown throughout the lower Amazon, from merchants in Santarém, and produced and shipped sacks to Belém for distribution. Mr. Antony remembers that the price his father received rose at this time, and they were able to move back to the city as a result. The factory also provided new employment opportunities and created a fledgling middle class of people who were lucky enough to gain management positions. The factory closed in the 1980s because the market for jute had dried up with industrial substitutes for jute and changes in the preferred packaging for shipping. The loss of these factory jobs is remembered as the beginning of a terrible time in Santarém. The downturn affected both urban and rural populations as the factory closed and the floodplain farmers lost the market for jute. At that time many of the jute farmers sold their land and migrated to the cities (Smith 1999). Writing about the impact of this collapsed economy in the wider Lower Amazon region, Smith (1999, p. 116) notes, “The demise of jute has also exacerbated urban poverty. The shuttering of jute factories has contributed to urban unemployment and the abandonment of numerous farms on the floodplain.” The abandoned and boarded up factories on the east side of Santarém still serve as a sad reminder of better days.

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The first of three factories built in Santarém was built by Mr. Sato, an immigrant from Japan. Mr. Sato invested profits from the factory in urban properties. Because he had only two daughters (neither of whom married locally), he was not be able to pass down the business within his family. His case serves as an example of the negative consequences when a member of the local elite does not reinvest in their extended family. Mr. Sato sold the factory at a discount to a local family that was just beginning to consolidate their wealth, the Ranaldis. Although for a time Mr. Sato was one of the most successful businessmen in Santarém, his family did not become one of the elite landowning families because he returned to Japan and his daughters moved to southeastern Brazil. The Ranaldis continued with the business, investing profits into various other ventures among their extended family. By the 1970s, the era of large profits from jute had already passed, but the Ranaldis were able to translate their purchase of the jute factory into diversified activities in urban real estate, lumber mills, and rural land. The Vieiras also built their wealth, in part, through the jute industry. They took over the jute operations of Jorge Mendes, who had come from Portugal to invest in the area. My informants shared Mr. Mendes’ story as a cautionary tale. In interviews, local landowners shared his story to convey the importance of only entering into a field of business once you have become familiar with it. Rather than wait until the risks and opportunities are clear, Mr. Mendes was nearly always one of the initial experimenters. At first he made tremendous profits. These gains were mainly due to his shipping business along the BelémSantarém route, where he operated several different boats that made that journey (Figure 6.3). His aggressive business ventures eventually resulted in substantial debts, however. He grew tired of the complications involved in his many businesses and the financial juggling 144

involved in managing debt. After falling behind on loan payments, he abruptly sold most of his operations to the Vieira family at a considerable loss and returned to Portugal.

Figure 6.3. Examples of the boats used to transport goods and people between Manaus, Santarém, and Belém. Some of the boats are owned and operated by landowners based in Santarém. The Cargill facility can be seen in the background. One of Mr. Vieira’s sons explained his family’s strategy following their purchase of the jute and transportation businesses. His father delayed entry into the jute market by purchasing an established business. The family benefited as well from a division of responsibility throughout the extended kinship network. “In reality, we’re a family business, see? So, [my father] is at the head [while] my brothers and I (because there are four of us) are below [him]. The decisions related to investments or financing, when it is time to make a decision, we always make a collective decision . . . and after that we determine which of the sons,

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which of the brothers, will have responsibility for that business.” The father is able to oversee the expansion of his family’s wealth while they tentatively move into new areas.

Cattle Ranching The jute boom and, to a lesser extent, rubber boom cycles were important for the local elite in building their wealth and prestige, but they did not invest in land in the upland area surrounding Santarém. While some of the elite claim to trace their floodplain land rights back to the colonial era, the development era in the Amazon (1970s) served as an important transition from a merchant elite to a landowning elite in Santarém, according to Nugent (1993). “The riverine focus of Santareno society has been altered by the opening of the hinterland, and the terra firme settlements of the past ten years constitute a radical departure from what had been, until the early 1970s, ‘normal’ processes of occupation in Amazônia” (Nugent 1993, p. 111). That hinterland was opened, in part through the construction of two primary roadways (Figure 6.4): the Cuiabá-Santarém Highway (BR163) and the state highway (PA-370) to the Curuá-Una Dam 72 km east of the city center (Semab 2000). The construction of both roadways was part of the National Integration Program and took place in the early 1970s, with the completion of the BR-163 in 1974 and PA-370 (Macedo 2002). Bureaucrats from the South moved in and augmented the local elite (Nugent 1993). Land speculation and the establishment of cattle ranches were the key investments when the highways opened the upland landscape south of Santarém, just as cattle ranching was a way to capture economic benefits elsewhere in the Amazon (Faminow 1997). 146

Source of underlying map: Hetrick 2004 Figure 6.4. Two major roadways in Santarém, indicated in yellow. BR-163, on the left, is the Santarém-Cuiabá Highway, connecting Santarém to the Central West. PA-370, on the right, connects Santarém to the Curuá-Una Dam to the southeast of the city.

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Cattle ranching has a long history in the floodplain regions north and east of Santarém going back to the Jesuit missions (Amorim 2000). By the time Henry Walter Bates arrived in 1848, the land was dominated by cattle and cacao, with the town already possessing “two or three butcher shops” (Bates 1875). Nigel Smith indicates that cattle ranching was, historically a key land use in the floodplain region near Santarém. “. . . [R]anching was a major, if not the single most important economic activity on the Amazon floodplain in the vicinity of Monte Alegre and Óbidos over 120 years ago” (Smith 1999, p. 84; see map in Figure 6.5).

Figure 6.5. Map of Santarém showing neighboring cities, including Óbidos and Monte Alegre.

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The floodplain offers limited grazing by the fact that large areas are inundated annually by the river. New areas of upland, opened due to the highway construction, do not have this problem but have another significant disadvantage for cattle ranching because water is scarce during the dry season. Wells for water for household or agricultural use must be deep (sometimes over 100 meters) and the dry season is long (VanWey et al. 2007). People told me that upland pastures degrade rapidly during the dry season if cattle density is over one head per hectare. When the upland areas opened up, members of the elite who already owned or held claim to floodplain areas began moving their cattle between the two pasture areas every year. They can use the floodplain grasslands during the dry season and the uplands in the wet season for higher productivity (Futemma 2000; McGrath et al. 1993). This advantage is not available to ranchers who only own upland pastures. The difference between upland pasture with cattle grazing year round and pasture with cattle that have floodplain pasture available was clearly visible as I drove through the upland areas. The owners who have pasture in both zones had upland green upland pastures even in the midst of the dry season. Upland pasture belonging to landowners without access to floodplain pasture looked over-grazed and brown during the dry season. The ranchers were pleased when I was able to identify which landowner owned no floodplain pasture simply by looking at the condition of the pasture. Being able or unable to rotate your cattle between these two zones is a socially significant difference for ranchers in Santarém.

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Transportation The government investment in road infrastructure provided a chance for investment in the transportation sector as well. Merchants who had good relationships with river transportation firms, often through their kinship system, possessed a significant advantage over other merchants, but the highways provided an alternative. A market for trucks and automobiles also presented a new economic sector for the local elite, and several families grew wealthy through buying and selling vehicles. They hauled cars to Santarém that were purchased in the South, or they got a concession from the car and truck companies to open a new car dealership in Santarém. The Duarte family minimized risks and built wealth by dealing in used cars and working in the shipping business before making a heavier investment in the car business. They imported used cars from other parts of Brazil by barge, and sold them throughout the lower Amazon. They eventually became the only dealers for a popular car brand in town, one of very few new vehicle dealerships in Santarém. The Duarte’s delayed entry into the new vehicle dealership market, however, allowed the family to gain strong relationships with shipping firms, parts suppliers and to build a network of local relationships, including potential customers and employees. These relationships helped the family succeed when they finally launched their dealership. Car and truck dealerships are one of the key business sectors in the local economy (Pereira 2003). A vehicle dealership is lucrative in Santarém because it is expensive and sometimes difficult to bring in vehicles. Sturdy, well-built vehicles are in demand, but bringing them into Santarém is difficult because of the poor condition of the roads. Because of the

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difficulty of bringing in vehicles, supply does not meet demand, so prices are high. Even used vehicles retain a high resale value.

The Gold Rush The national government became more favorable to conservation initiatives in the Amazon during the 1980s (Schwartzman and Zimmerman 2005). The sense of optimism following large infrastructure investments during the 1970s among the local elite waned. Just as the government investments were dwindling, however, gold was discovered in southern Pará, and a gold rush ensued. Some of the elite became involved in the gold rush, indirectly by investing in businesses related to the gold economy. These businesses thrived in the city center during the 1980s. Gold was not found near Santarém, but further upstream on the Tapajós River. As elsewhere in the Amazon, gold mining was an informal activity without regulation of work conditions or contracts, primarily conducted by small- or medium-sized work groups using simple and portable technology (Cleary 1990). Despite the informal nature of production, gold and related industries were valued at well above a billion dollars annually by the late 1980s, surpassing major industries in the formal economy both in terms of output and employment (Cleary 1990). The local elite in Santarém moved into the gold economy late, compared to Itaituba-based operations, and started by extending credit to miners, selling equipment to mining operations, and buying gold. Electronics and other retail operations sprouted up to sell to prospectors who often spent their newfound wealth quickly and impulsively. One landowner described it in this way: 151

Here in “the time of [gold] mining,” I know people who took a taxi to buy a hammock . . . a hammock! The hammock costs eight reais and the taxi costs eighty reais, you understand? Because of the ease with which they could get the gold they didn’t care. I saw it. It was amazing! To take a taxi there to buy a hammock. How much is the hammock? Eight reais! Get the hammock [purchase] taken care of and put in the taxi, then go here and there, grab a beer . . . in the end, how much [did he spend]? Eighty [reais alone for] the taxi? Ten times more than the hammock! The elite opened hardware and equipment stores, and stores that served to outfit expeditions. Cleary (1990) has shown that gold mining supported investors who were distant from the areas of production, and a wide array of businesses as is true in most gold rush economies. According to several business owners I spoke with, one of the most lucrative parts of this economy for merchants in Santarém was selling “luxury goods” and consumer electronics to those who had sold their gold. Amazon gold miners binging on consumer electronics and luxury goods when they arrive in Santarém is another example of the type of binge consumption associated with masculine crew culture, harsh working conditions, indebted workers, and gang labor (Wilk 2007). During the gold rush, retail operations expanded rapidly. This period is remembered today by many landowners as a time of economic health, a peak from which Santarém is now in a slow, but persistent decline (Figure 6.6). One landowner, whose family has been in the area for several generations, tried to provide some perspective on the gold era, saying,

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Take a friend of mine who is from Ceara. I was talking with him and he said that when he came here 40 years ago it was much better than today. . . . That was the time of [gold] mining and he said he saw money flowing through the city. At the time, he managed to acquire his wealth; a businessman can’t do that today.

Figure 6.6. The Amazon Park Hotel, built when money related to the gold boom was flowing through Santarém, was an example of the capacity of Santarém to have modern, upscale accommodations. It has since fallen into disrepair.

Diverse Operations along with Cattle Ranching The elite families own commercial, residential, and rural properties. They consider real property (land and buildings) the most secure investment under the economic conditions in the Amazon, while business ventures pose a higher risk. To hedge against these risks,

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most people start business ventures in partnership with other members of their extended kinship networks, including the younger generation. The opportunities and required skills varied from the jute boom through the opening of the upland region to cattle ranching and the gold rush. Family members trust that the new generation is more likely than the previous generation to understand new opportunities. Thus, in successful families, younger family members are encouraged to investigate new economic sectors. They test the possibility of new sources of income, without risking the core family business and wealth. One of the cattle ranching families with a long history in the region sent their oldest son to school in Rio Grande do Sul, while another family sent their daughter to school in the Central West. They both received degrees in fields that are related to but independent of the core family businesses. Children are expected to be creative in seeking new paths to wealth, both to establish new sources of income for the extended family and to establish their own identities as economically successful entrepreneurs. This differs from the poorer families in Santarém where children learn the trades or skills of their parents (Nugent 1993). Because of the emphasis on diversity of activities within the landowning families, a cattle ranch is only one part of a portfolio of activities, and the primary economic value of the ranch is the value of land (Hecht 1993). Beyond the social and cultural functions of a ranch, cattle ranchers in the Amazon use their land and cattle as a hedge against economic fluctuations and as a way to capture government incentives (Moran 1993b). Because ranching is so secure, it is an ideal economic activity for the cautious local elite.

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Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD - aphtae epizooticae) has been a concern in Brazil since 1951 when the Pan-American Center of Foot and Mouth Disease was founded in Rio de Janeiro (Mayen 2003). Vaccine campaigns pushed through the country in waves, but, for the most part, ignored the Amazon. The local elite are encouraged by recent vaccine efforts targeting the Amazon because with a FMD-free Amazon, a better market for their beef will emerge. Because FMD has not been eradicated for Amazon cattle, the market for beef is local, so large-scale landowners raise the same low-quality cattle as their poorer neighbors. The market is changing, though. The eradication of foot-and-mouth disease in the southern Amazon, including the states of Mato Grosso, Acre, and the southern half of the state of Pará (south of the Santarém study area) has improved the likelihood that a beef export market will finally emerge (Nepstad et al. 2006), so ranchers in Santarém have increased the quality of their cattle breeds in anticipation. The large-scale ranchers I spoke with emphatically favored an expansion of the eradication zone into Santarém. They see tremendous growth potential if they are able to export their beef to other parts of Brazil or internationally. While the ranchers are feeling more hopeful, it is uncertain how a state with such a poor quality herd will be able to export beef, even if the exported beef is disease-free. Given the improving prospect for beef, some ranchers are becoming increasingly frustrated and angry at their inability to make money from cattle. “I need to sell three pounds of beef to buy a pound of fish!” one local rancher complained. Despite these frustrations, some are gearing up for a new market that would pay more for better quality differences in beef. As I describe in a later section of this chapter, in dealing with land-use changes following the arrival of Gaúchos, some local ranchers are seeking to populate their herds with new 155

breeds and better quality beef cattle. This would transform the local beef cattle market into a two-tiered system, in which export-quality beef could be produced and shipped away, while just down the road an impoverished farmer keeps a handful of low-quality beef cattle as a hedge against disaster. Logging and ranching are intimately associated in the Amazon (Merry et al. 2006). This means that logging activities often serve as a precursor to the establishment of a ranch. Critics of deforestation see the logging interests and cattle ranching interests as cooperating to resist policies aimed at reducing deforestation (Hecht 1993). There are two primary advantages for a landowner allowing logging on his/her land. Landowners collect fees from the logging operations, and have a reduced expense in clearing the land for pasture. The logging operation also creates secondary and feeder roads into new areas, saving the landowner the expense of construction (Sorrensen 2000). Because logging and ranching interests are so synergistic, it is not uncommon for a local landowning family to maintain financial stakes in both industries. The Ranaldi family discussed earlier exemplifies this type of vertical integration. This family owns land, ranches, trucks, a timber mill, and a lumber outlet. They are able to move wood through their own network without needing to sell to others, an important feature in a regulatory environment with strict laws but inconsistent enforcement. The businesses are run by different members of the extended family, with each specializing in a particular sector. They are able to shift money among the construction, ranching, and transportation sectors depending on the particular political and economic conditions, which are always

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changing. This flexibility helps the family avoid economic stagnation and remain in a position to take advantage of booms.

How the Local Elite Adapted to the Mechanized Agriculture Boom As I described in Chapter 5, the local elite predicted the arrival of mechanized agriculture and worked toward its realization. The development era of the 1970s brought a great deal of optimism about the agricultural potential of the region. While the intervening years have frustrated some, many large-scale landowners remain convinced that the region has tremendous potential. Modernization and economic growth are central to their vision for a successful community with a hopeful future. They intend to recapture that hopeful outlook they once had. Since mechanized agriculture began to develop in the early 2000s, the local elite have used a number of strategies to adjust to its arrival.

Strategies with the Changing Land Market Two of the landowners I spoke with were younger members of elite families or first- or second-generation elites. They had enough land to qualify as large-scale landowners, but modest holdings relative to prominent landowners. They sold their land to Gaúchos and used the proceeds to purchase much larger ranches on land that was not well suited to agriculture, but was fine for ranching. These landowners and a handful of other big landowners I was not able to interview sold land they owned near BR-163 or along the Curuá-Una Highway and bought land either further out on BR-163, where transportation 157

costs made soybeans and rice less cost effective, or between Santarém and Alter do Chão. In this area uneven topography, sandy soils, and a local history of active community resistance made large-scale landownership less attractive and land purchases by Gaúchos especially difficult. Interestingly, both landowners I spoke with who had bought land in the area between Santarém and Alter do Chão took pains to justify their purchase as a benefit to the local community they now saw themselves joining. They had to take on a more extensive set of patron responsibilities that included connecting the community to political leaders and new economic opportunities. For example, one bought equipment needed to convert fruit collected by the communities into frozen pulp that could be sold in Santarém or shipped to Belém. Most large-scale landowners did not sell their land to Gaúchos; they adapted to the arrival of mechanized agriculture in many other ways.

Rural Land Some of the elite invested in developing businesses as land dealers (see Chapter 5). As the Gaúchos began to arrive, the price of land rose unevenly (Steward 2004). In 1998, prices were about $330/ha; by 2001–2003, they had risen to $660/ha. The prices reported by my informants varied dramatically depending on the location and condition of the land, title, and improvements, ranging from $500/ha to $1500/ha. A local landowner who is not selling said, “The price is based on speculation about the agricultural potential; when the market is established and the infrastructure is in place the price will be much higher.”

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There were other reasons not to sell. Many of the local landowners valued their ranches for non-economic reasons. Ranches are symbolic ties to their rural past and are closely connected with social status and masculinity. They are also a retreat from the stressful life of an urban business owner and a place for the family to come together on holidays and birthdays. These social and cultural functions limit the appeal of selling land, even for a high price. When the large landholdings were held off the market, prices went up even faster, and this led to renewed pressure to reinforce land claims and defend property boundaries. As the possession of land became more important, absentee landowners hired poorer local farmers and small-scale landowners to guard their land, to protect it from encroachment. The landowners explained that hiring someone to guard the land was socially responsible, because it helped avoid conflict when someone who occupied the land without permission has to be removed. The payment for guarding land was usually permission granted to the guard to clear and plant a small area. This practice already existed, but the local elite began doing a great deal more of this after the Gaúchos arrived. Some of the local elite chose to rent their land to the arriving farmers. Landowners who chose to rent are primarily two types of landowners. Some did not use the ranch for family activities, because their family had left Santarém, while others wanted to keep the land as an economic investment. Some elites living in Santarém rented their land because they eventually wanted to get involved in mechanized agriculture. Renting land allowed them to gain expertise, meeting the important players involved in farming, learning farming techniques, and preparing the land without expending capital or taking out loans.

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Urban Real Estate A handful of families invested in property management businesses or in building new homes. They purchased rental homes and managed others’ rental properties. Many families with nicer homes (including the local elite) found it profitable to move further outside the city center in order to rent their homes to the Gaúchos. During the expansion of mechanized agriculture, the Ranaldi family bought three times more urban properties and more than doubled the number of properties they were managing. Most of these houses had to be modified to meet the standards of the arriving Gaúchos, who preferred greater security, including a wall and locked gate, better electrical service and air conditioning, garaged parking for two vehicles, and a swimming pool. Some of the local elite developed a negative impression of the Gaúchos as arrogant or undisciplined in helping to outfit these upgraded rental homes.

Farm Equipment There was only one tractor dealer in Santarém in 1996, the tractor dealership owned by the Duarte family. During my fieldwork in 2005 there were five dealerships. The tractor dealership also moved from its original location downtown to an expanded and updated facility out of town on the Cuiába-Santarém Highway. A number of parts stores were also opened or expanded by local landowning families.

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Grain Storage There is no need to store soybeans, as Cargill purchases 100% of the local production and still seeks to purchase a quantity eight times greater than local production from other growing areas in Brazil in order to fill their shipping schedule. The capacity for rice storage in Santarém was, however, a serious concern early in the development of mechanized agriculture. The storage capacity was reached early in the harvest season and very long lines of trucks waiting to be unloaded at the rice processing facilities from that point onward. The farmers had to pay the drivers for time spent waiting to unload, which cut into their profits or resulted in losses when the price of rice was low. Businesses and farmers that had been investing in rice storage halted their investments during the year I was in the field, despite the obvious need for more capacity in Santarém, because rice prices were too low to justify further investments.

Grain Processing The Vieira family moved into the packaged rice business. They designed and built a stateof-the-art facility along the Curuá-Una Highway in 2004 (Figure 6.7). Unfortunately, the high-end equipment has proven expensive to maintain in the high-dust/high-moisture environment. Because of the unexpected expenses the Vieiras were concerned about their ability to turn a profit even though they had market advantages, including vertical integration of their shipping and transportation businesses and close relationships with farmers producing rice, but margins were low. I noted in Chapter 5 that the Vieira family divided responsibilities for their various investments, and the rice processing facility was 161

also a collective decision by the family. One of the patriarch’s sons took responsibility for this business. He had helped attract other investors who had previous experience in grain processing, and he was using it as an experience to learn important connections that he hoped to use in an industry that he wanted to move into next: high-quality beef export. He already has expertise in shipping and exporting, along with cattle ranching, so adding grain processing to the portfolio is an incremental step in the right direction for him and the family.

Figure 6.7. The author with a local landowner who has invested in grain processing.

New Job Opportunities Another way that the local elite said they intend to tap into the new opportunities is by encouraging their children to enter into the mechanized agriculture economy, by finding 162

work on one of the new farms or in related enterprises that will help them learn the business. While some of the local elite’s children had sought work on Gaúchos’ farms in Santarém, during my fieldwork I was not aware of any cases of them being hired. Some of them were able to find work on farms in the Central West or the South, usually following a college program focused on agriculture. Once they return to Santarém, they would ideally be able to begin to grow soybeans, corn, and/or rice, combining their expertise with local family resources to facilitate a smooth and successful land-use transition. Upwardly mobile workers in Santarém are seeking higher salaried job opportunities in the grain processing and grain storage industries. These types of skilled and managerial jobs are a middle-class profession in Santarém. In one interview, an employee became very emotional describing the opportunity provided by a job in a grain processing facility and how his children will now have a better life than he had. The investors and owners of grain operations are very proud to be creating higher status jobs for local employees. The commercial sector of the economy has expanded since the arrival of the Gaúchos (Pereira 2003). The expansion was indirectly related to the expansion of agriculture, and local studies have claimed that there has been a dramatic, positive effect on the local economy (Pereira 2005). Retail stores and other department stores, like Armazém Paraíba, expanded rapidly and increased their in-house stock of upscale consumer goods during my fieldwork in 2005, and the difference between that period and 2003, when I first visited Santarém, was even more noticeable (Figures 6.8 and 6.9). The wholesale businesses have changed their style of operating, as they move from a system based on small stores in rural communities and irregular patterns of resupply from warehouses in Belém to a stronger

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focus on maintaining a more reliable stock of consumer products in Santarém. The retail establishments have run into trouble maintaining customer loyalty among the Gaúchos when they have periodic shortages in products. Santarenos accept periodic shortages as a feature of the regional economy due to the difficulty of transportation and the cost of maintaining a heavy investment in stock. Storeowners explained that the shortages were very pronounced during the hyperinflation of the 1980s because transaction speed was the most important factor for merchants and holding stock became very expensive. To avoid losing value by holding onto stock, merchants kept their stocks low and sold their full shipments as quickly as possible.

Figure 6.8. Downtown Santarém, 2003.

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Figure 6.9. Downtown Santarém, 2005. The same location as in Figure 6.8, two years later. Three sectors that have seen a tremendous amount of growth in Santarém are service stations, the construction industry, and car dealerships (Pereira 2005). These three sectors have expanded the number of businesses operating, upgraded service, increased employment, and brought higher profits. The opportunities for employment in these sectors are uneven. There are not enough local skilled workers to fill all the new middleclass jobs, and the people arriving from rural communities do not have the skills and education for these jobs. The service stations do not employ many, but increases in the number of stations and the volume of sales have increased the demand for reliable managers. Several of the local landowners own gas stations, and they reported some frustration finding workers who they felt were suitable for a management position. They were not entirely clear about what 165

the qualifications would be, but there are obviously subtle signs of education, social class, and background that they are using to evaluate job applicants. The local elite seek employees with an even higher social status for car dealerships than for a service station manager. The employees must have the social “grace” needed to interact with car buyers. There is a glut of unskilled labor and a shortage of skilled labor in the construction industry. The specialization in the construction industry is a new phenomenon in Santarém. Previously, each worker had the same basic skills and the same construction methods were used for nearly every project, including upper-class houses, defined more by size and location than by features. Buildings are now being built to much higher standards, requiring trained electricians, engineers, and plumbers. In combination with the jobs at car dealerships, the new opportunities in construction bode well for the creation of a middle class.

Land-Use Changes by the Local Elite Besides changes in the urban economy, large-scale landowners are shifting their land-use practices as mechanized agriculture moves into the area. There are four basic types of changes: (1) continue ranching, (2) invest in better breeds of cattle, but continue ranching, (3) transition from cattle to agriculture as part of a generational shift in control of land-use decisions, and (4) become rural entrepreneurs by renting land to Gaúchos. Some landowners continue as they have because they believe this cycle will pass. They feel that the region will continue to be disconnected from the national and international

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markets, because of the region’s poverty, infrastructure, or the powerful outside interests who want to keep the area out of competition in national markets. Large-scale cattle ranchers in the Amazon have developed a system of investing in land and cattle, and some want to continue with this system because it is familiar and reliable. These landowners are typically ranchers with fewer urban ties, possibly an older patriarch with children who are professional. They see their role as the founders of a successful family, so new innovations should be undertaken by their children, who have more expertise and better connections. Others continue cattle ranching but move into a more highly valued breed of cattle. As I noted earlier in the chapter, the market for high-quality beef is expected to improve dramatically with the increased connectivity to outside markets (Nepstad et al. 2006). The rise in land values justifies more investment in cattle. Some ranchers are switching to a confinement system and reducing the area they maintain in pasture. The cost of feeding the cattle and building structures is seen as an investment that will be repaid by the higher price they expect to receive for the higher-quality beef. The large-scale landowners who are interested in shifting to higher-quality cattle herds and confinement operations are frustrated with the lack of an effective regional vaccination program. They expressed sympathy for their poorer neighbors who can’t afford to vaccinate their cattle and blame the government for not supporting these smaller producers, by wiping out disease and improving the poor reputation of local beef. In reaction to the new agricultural economy, a third group of local elite landowners plan to hand over the land-use decision making to their children, who have been trained in agronomy or agricultural engineering. Most expressed some reservations about the

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strategies that their children are advocating, but they also feel that their children are able to see possibilities that they cannot, because they lack education and exposure to outside ideas. Rodrigo Santoro raised cattle on the floodplain. His son, Diogo, began rotating cattle between upland pasture and floodplain pasture. Now his grandson, Alvaro, who studied agronomy in Belém, plans to turn half of the upland pasture into a soybean field. The Santoros don’t have the capital to invest in this project yet, so they have chosen to rent the land to a neighboring Gaúcho for the first few seasons. Diogo said this type of land use was strange to him, but in the same way that he added an upland ranch to his father’s floodplain ranch, he expected his sons to develop a new approach to land use. Most landowners expect their sons to be knowledgeable about new land-use strategies and able to continue to build the family’s wealth. The shifts in land use in the Amazon as land is handed down to the next generation bears some similarity to the multigenerational adjustments made by farmers in central Illinois, who would add a small beef cattle operation to their grain farms when their sons neared the age to begin farming (Rogers 1987). In Illinois, the preparation for a generational shift was seen as a temporary shift to a mixed farm followed by a swift return to a specialized operation. In the Brazilian Amazon, the lessons drawn from a history of boom-and-bust cycles have created an expectation that each generation will develop a distinct land-use strategy. The fourth group of landowners switched their land-use from cattle ranching to mechanized agriculture, but there were two approaches to this switch. A very small number of rural-based large-scale landowners with less accumulated capital, an

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entrepreneurial mindset, and a higher tolerance for risk than their neighbors purchased equipment, prepared their lands, and planted rice. Unfortunately, because these landowners relied heavily on bank financing and did not have a capital reserve, they were unable to withstand the drop in prices for rice and soybeans in 2005. Every example of a rural-based local landowner who had switched from cattle to mechanized agriculture that I knew about was thought to be or admitted to being in default with the bank. The more cautious local elite and the Gaúchos both blamed them for poor use of credit, because they used borrowed money to pay for nearly all of their expenses, including land preparation, farm infrastructure and planting, chemicals, and harvest. Those I spoke with who had done this were unwilling to discuss any specifics related to their use of credit, but admitted that they were not planning to plant anything during the coming year (2006). Most were planning to rent their land to Gaúchos. Several had sold equipment in an attempt to remain solvent. The second way local landowners moved into grain production was to rent land to a Gaúcho. The landowners who switched in this way include the political elite of Santarém; a former mayor, the vice-mayor, and the mayor’s husband. These landowners are all adequately capitalized, and many have struck deals that have allowed them to stage their entry into the market slowly, including renting the land initially to a farmer who provides the land clearing and preparation. This allowed them to avoid the costs of preparing their land and insured that a farmer with more experience in the preparation techniques supervises the work. This approach also allowed them to stagger their expenses, avoiding credit and construction costs. The same social connections and skill in negotiation that have led them to be successful politically are useful in negotiating the terms of their 169

engagement with other actors in the grain economy, but their great visibility has also made them targets for allegations of false land claims and illegal forest clearing.

Summary The local elite have adapted to the arrival of mechanized agriculture in several ways. Some have simply attempted to enter into mechanized agriculture immediately using credit from banks and government programs. These landowners have not done well. The larger portion of the local elite have used long-standing strategies to avoid exposure to high levels of risk and build their wealth with strategies involving the entire kinship system. They have pursued opportunities in related industries with some success. Examples of these strategies include the construction of grain-processing facilities, the expansion of retail establishments downtown, and the expansion of tractor and other farm-equipment businesses. Three areas of expanded activity that have generated employment include service stations, increases in both the quantity and quality of local construction projects, and growth in the retail market for cars and trucks. These sectors could potentially expand the ranks of the middle class in Santarém. Besides the investments in economic opportunities in the city center, there have been changes in rural land-use patterns and investments. Some landowners simply sold their land to expand their ranches in areas that were not well suited for mechanized agriculture. Others entered into mechanized agriculture gradually by initially renting their land to

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farmers. Some of the local elite are investing in the production of high-quality beef because of optimistic prospects for beef export. I suggested that there have been both adaptations by the arriving Gaúchos to what they encountered in Santarém and adjustments in the behavior of the local elite in reaction to the arrival of the Gaúchos and the expansion of mechanized agriculture. Initially, the local elite did not have a close relationship with the arriving Gaúchos. Instead of both groups finding shared adaptations to a new economy, both groups moved ahead with their own projects in new ways. That relationship changed, however, once pressure from environmentalists on local large-scale landowners built. That change is the topic of the next chapter.

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Chapter 7 Environmentalist Pressure Leads to an Alliance between the Gaúchos and the Local Elite

The preceding chapters have described the theoretical and historical contexts of the arrival of soybean farmers in the Amazon and the resulting changes for both the local elite and the Gaúchos who arrived to establish farms near Santarém. In addition to changes within these two groups, their relationships to each other changed as well. Despite their distinct cultural economies, social networks, and economic incentives, they became much closer when they perceived that environmentalists were threatening their visions for the region. In this chapter, I will address the basis for both kinds of landowners to draw together in the face of a perceived threat and the implications of this. First, I need to explain how that perceived threat—opposition to their goals by social activists and environmentalists—took shape as a reaction to the arrival of soybean farming. This new phase in the “development” of Santarém and the associated changes in the social relationships provide a continuation of prior conflicts related to the future of the Amazon and some new challenges. The arrival of soybeans has shaped the way the local elite make decisions about investment, work, and how they use their land, as I explained in the previous chapter. However, as I explained in Chapter 3, more attention among scholars and activists has been directed toward the changes in the lives of smallholders and the potential impact on deforestation rates when discussing economic trends and development policies in the Amazon. Recent studies of soybean expansion also follow this pattern, but evaluation of the 172

effects of that expansion on smallholders and deforestation rates was outside the scope of this project. Indeed, as I mentioned in Chapter 4, addressing the question of rural depopulation or deforestation directly while working with large landowners would have triggered their suspicions and reduced my ability to learn about their ideas and practices. Therefore, I will briefly review recent scholarship related to smallholders and deforestation before moving on to explain the alliance that was formed between the two elites. The uncertain land-titling situation in Santarém creates greater difficulties for smallholders than for large landowners when rural land is being claimed, because most smallholders do not own titles to their land. This means that, recently, many of them have simply been dispossessed from the land that they considered to be theirs. “The land titling and settlement agency, INCRA, believes that less than 30 percent of colonos in this area have formal land title. However, colonos know their land boundaries, and fellow community members and INCRA generally respect them” (Steward 2004, p. 15). INCRA’s informal policy of not giving colonos formal titles in places where other colonos already live was not adequate to protect many smallholders from losing claims to land they believed was theirs. The arriving farmers came from areas with much more definitive land titling and had economic incentives to ignore the unofficial local practices. If smallholders were fortunate enough to be able to sell their land, reports often circulated that they were pressured to sell. In an interview with the Rural Workers Union in Santarém, I was told that some smallholders were forced to sell at gunpoint. The only incidents I was able to find any evidence of took place in southern Pará State, a very

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different setting from Santarém with a violent history of land struggles and armed land grabs by large landowners (Simmons et al. 2007). Even under the most respectful negotiating scenario, however, where there was no intimidation and land was purchased, rather than “possessed,” the wide gulf between information available to large-scale landowners and small-scale landowners would result in heavily unbalanced negotiations. Once the smallholders sold, they would usually move to either Santarém or Manaus (Valbuena 2009). This process of moving from rural areas to cities is a well-established pattern in the Amazon and does not necessarily preclude a later return to rural areas. “Urban residency typically is unstable over time. Households often move between urban and rural places several times” (Browder and Godfrey 1997, p. 256). John Browder and Brian Godfrey (1997) also show that in their study areas in Pará and Rondônia there is an “inverted stepwise migration pattern” as urban residents in the Amazon move to smaller settlements in search of new opportunities. The move to Santarém and Manaus, then, is likely the initial step in a move to a new rural frontier. They are likely to continue their interaction and participation in rural life. Our data suggest that many urbanward migrants in Amazonia are not really absent from rural zones; they remain members of households with livelihood activities in both rural and urban environments. Whatever their primary residence, these mobile Amazonians continue to participate in rural-urban networks, maintain their rural-based preferences and needs, and retain their knowledge of rural resources and products. (Padoch et al. 2008)

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The continued connection to rural life and the cyclical nature of migration between Santarém and rural areas outside Santarém was remarked upon by previous researchers in the area as well (Nugent 1993; WinklerPrins and de Sousa 2005). The more recent rural exodus to Santarém from the farms that have been consolidated into soybean farms may have been reduced, in part, by the movement of some former small-scale landowners into the growing urbanizing villages near Santarém (VanWey et al. 2007), but the directionality of the flow during my fieldwork in 2005 was rural-to-urban in reference to Santarém and the rural hinterland. City leaders were concerned about pressure on the city from increasing inmigration and the impact this would have on their efforts to beautify and modernize Santarém. Their actions resulted in pressure on the poor, caught between inmigration from rural areas and reduced housing in areas being “improved” (Valbuena 2009). This means that migrants from the rural communities being swallowed by land consolidation were facing difficulties in establishing themselves and losing their foothold in Santarém. Many, reportedly, moved on to Manaus, due to the presence of manufacturing and the perception that there was potential to find and claim land in the forest outside the city (Mayer 2005; see Mayer 2009 re: factory workers in Manaus). The expansion of cropland near Santarém also has a negative impact on the deforestation rate. While the deforestation rate throughout the Amazon has risen or fallen depending on various factors, the overall rate has been greater than 10,000 km2 each year (Figure 7.1). The economic sectors responsible for driving deforestation in the Amazon, in terms of land area, have been primarily cattle ranching and logging. “Cattle ranching is the use put to the great majority of land cleared, either immediately upon clearing in the case of large ranchers, or after a harvest or two of an annual crop in the case of small farmers” 175

(Fearnside 2007, p. 2). The fact that more clearing events take place on small farms but large landowners are still responsible for a larger area of land cleared is made apparent when the area and clearing events are graphed together. Figure 7.2 shows how fewer clearing events by the large landowners can still have a disproportionately large impact on the overall deforestation rate.

Deforestation in the Legal Amazon 35000 30000

20000 15000 10000 Area of Connecticut

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0 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

km2/year

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Source: Projeto PRODES/INPE Figure 7.1. Deforestation rate in the Legal Amazon, 1988–2008.

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100 90 80 70 60 % 50

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Source: INPE Using Prodis Data on Legal Amazon 2003

Figure 7.2. Percent of clearing events and percent of land area cleared by property size. (See Brondízio et al. 2009)

While cattle ranching is the ultimate destination of most cleared land in the Santarém area, it is important to note that the causes of deforestation are complicated and variable across time and space. “Environment, history, economics, politics, and demography are thoroughly implicated, as are exchange rates, currency inflation, legal institutions, road construction, colonization schemes, tax laws, financial markets, commodity prices, and tenure security, to name only a few of the more salient variables noted in the literature” (Wood 2002, p. 6). The impact of this deforestation is multifaceted but includes the loss of biodiversity (Moran 1993b), changes in water cycling (Nepstad et al. 2001), and an 177

increase in the release of greenhouse gases due to burning and decomposition of plant material (Carvalho et al. 2001; Nepstad et al. 1999). Because of these negative impacts, concerns about deforestation in the region by environmentalists are justified, but their approaches to defending the forest have varied through time.

Environmentalism and Social Activism in the Amazon Protecting the Forest from the People “The Amazon” as an environmentalist project emerged onto the global stage in the 1980s as the rate of deforestation rose dramatically. In an effort to increase the sensitivity of their Western backers to the events in the Amazon, organizations strongly emphasized the perils and negative consequences of deforestation in their dealings with the media, and the resulting coverage tended to be alarmist and sensational. The Amazon has been portrayed variously as an analogy for Eden, as a mythical setting for European adventurers, and as a vast, unpopulated wilderness (Slater 2002). This means that when environmentalists advocate for a “fortress conservation” approach, establishing parks that are free from human inhabitants, they are missing the context of the social history of the landscape in the Amazon. “Many North American environmentalists become uneasy, if not outraged, at our argument that the North American conservation model, the legal and ideological framework on which virtually all Third World conservation rests, has been transposed with as little sensitivity to Third World social and biological realities as the large scale monocrop model of industrial agriculture” (Hecht and Cockburn 1989, p. 269).

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The fear of humans in nature is related to the way the deforestation pattern has been portrayed in the press. A good example of the sensationalist coverage was the Time magazine cover in 1989, which shows a burning skull destroying the forest and threatening animals at the end of a barren dirt roadway (Figure 7.3). This image highlights how environmentalists were concerned mainly with the expansion of roadways and clearing of land along their perimeters.

Figure 7.3. Cover from Time magazine, September 1989.

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Ideas about the Amazon disappearing forever, turning into a desert or disappearing and causing a worldwide lack of clean air were introduced during this first phase of global concern about the Amazon and remain in circulation today. “Dramatic images of the Amazonian rain forest in flames have become etched in the minds of people throughout the world, even among those who otherwise know little about the Amazon and probably less about Latin America. By virtue of their power to simplify a complex story, alarming scenes of burning trees and charred landscapes are readily invoked by concerned citizens and scientists in venues that range from grade school classrooms to the bargaining tables of international organizations” (Wood 2002, p. 1). The journalist Geoffrey Lean (2006a,b), in recent articles published in The Independent (UK), emphasized three of the enduring myths: the “Amazon rainforest ‘could become a desert’” (2006a); the Amazon is turning into a desert (2006a); and deforestation in the Amazon will damage the “lungs of the world” and consequently worsen life on Earth (2006b). While the phrase “The Amazon is the lungs of the world” is found ubiquitously in popular press articles about the Amazon, the claim that the Amazon supplies other parts of the world with oxygen is not true (Fearnside 2008). However, the image is useful in bringing home the idea that distant events have important implications for everyone and pose a serious threat to us (Moran 1993b). The attention of news organizations and the imagery they use are important trends to understand as a basis for mobilizing conservation efforts in the region, but the activities of global non-government organizations (NGOs)

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focused on environmental causes are also important, as these organizations often have a presence in the region and a more direct impact on the lives of people living there. Campaigns to “save” the Amazon were begun by several organizations, including Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), The Rainforest Alliance, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund), and others. There are Brazilian environmental organizations, but the majority of conservation activities within the Amazon are funded and directed primarily by American and European environmental activists. These well-funded projects act as a conduit for First World ideas about the best uses of the Amazon. The initial strategies advocated by environmental NGOs involved creating reserves that would then be free from any human activity in a model referred to as “fortress conservation” (Brockington, 2002). While a striking counterexample can be found in the extractive reserves, the idea of setting aside wilderness areas to be free from human presence was central to early conservation efforts. The American park system served as a model for protected areas in the Amazon (Hecht and Cockburn 1989). This would change, however as social activists and conservationists began to work together.

Social Activists and Community-Based Conservation Santarém has been noted for the presence of organizations advocating for the poor, starting with local church leaders who helped organize and support poorer rural communities through The Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), an organization affiliated with the Catholic Church. The CPT was founded in 1975 by a group of Catholic bishops to

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intervene in land conflict, provide legal help to poor farmers, and support the rights of rural peasants (Adriance 1995). The establishment of a National Park along the Tapajós River southwest of Santarém resulted in the expulsion of several communities that were already established within the intended boundaries of the park (Toniolo 2004). These communities reacted against the legitimacy of this policy. Some of the people I encountered working against the arrival of soy were veterans of the previous conflict, which had involved members of the CPT and environmental organizations such as WWF (Toniolo 2004). In their struggle against the expulsion of communities from within the Tapajós National Park, the communities were eventually granted a number of concessions, including the ability to maintain active settlements within the park and the right to clear a limited amount of forest to plant their crops. The activists I spoke with felt that this was a clear victory in their efforts to have community rights respected in policy decisions made at non-local levels of government. As the broader debate among scholars and environmentalists about successful conservation strategies began to acknowledge a greater need for community involvement (Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Brockington, 2002), the communities in Santarém also became more assertive in making a claim that slowing deforestation should not trump their own concerns about their livelihoods. Most environmental groups in the area switched to a more community-based conservation model that took local community economic development as one of the components of their conservation strategies. Local community/environment projects also emerged, including community projects with conservation goals carried out by Saúde Alegria and conservation projects with community

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development goals carried out by the Projeto Varzéa through The Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). In the Tapajós National Forest, one of the most successful projects involved ecotourism and artisan crafts made with non-timber forest products (Figures 7.4, 7.5, and 7.6). These were recently highlighted by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman during a November 2009 trip to the park (Friedman 2009).

Figure 7.4. A resident of one of the villages that now lies within a protected area conducting an ecotour and demonstrating an example of useful plants along a path that connects two villages.

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Figure 7.5. Ecotourists listening to local folklore at a stop at one of the riverside villages in the Tapajós National Forest (author, far right).

When soybean farmers started moving into the area around 1998, their presence was alarming for people concerned with the deforestation rate and those concerned about the livelihoods of the rural poor. The backlash against soy, therefore, has been multifaceted and involved various actors. Brazilian organizations active in the region have worked to document and speak out against reports of violence and intimidation and the decline of rural communities as small farmers migrate to urban areas. The strength of these NGOs in the Amazon lies in their ability to articulate the advantages for both community-based activism and global environmentalism in the solutions they propose. The organizations 184

present alternative models of development and conservation, showing in some cases how “strong social movements and participation of the local communities may be more effective than conventional conservation strategies that have emphasized the role of the state and the exclusion of local populations” (Campos and Nepstad 2006, p. 1555). In Santarém, these organizations include the Santarém Rural Workers Union, the CPT, The Amazon Institute or Environmental Research (IPAM), Saúde Alegria, and others.

Figure 7.6. One of the most popular ecotourism activities is a long hike to view some of the massive trees in the Tapajós National Park (author on the left).

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Recent Efforts by Environmental and Social Justice Groups Part 1: Reviving Sensationalist Story Lines It is in the context of a strong environmentalist presence and a social activist network with strong local roots, as well as better cooperation with global environmentalist NGOs, that a new response emerges to the arrival of soybeans. In 2003, news stories about the imminent demise of Amazônia under the wheels of soybean farmers’ tractors began appearing. “Where the jungle once offered shelter to parrots and deer, the land is now increasingly being cleared for soybeans, Brazil's hottest cash crop” (Rohter 2003). These stories were just as sensationalist as the prior environmental catastrophe stories and, as usual, ignored the social and economic complexities of the region. The same story line of imminant destruction accompanied by images suggesting a massive and tragic loss of forest continue to be the primary news perspective on the region (Figure 7.7). According to Google News Archive Search (last accessed December 26, 2009), 1,130 news stories were published on soybean expansion in the Amazon between 2001 and 2009. The New York Times alone published 33 stories during that time. Extended stories from The New York Times, Guardian (UK), and National Public Radio kept the attention of Americans and Europeans on the expansion of soybeans, which were almost universally portrayed as a dangerous threat to the Amazon, still represented as a vast unpopulated forest.

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Source: Guardian 2008 Figure 7.7. “Vast swaths of Brazil's Amazon rainforest continues [sic] to be cleared despite environmental concerns. Photograph: Stephen Ferry/Getty.” The article associated with this image quotes Greenpeace and Conservation International in support of the claim that Brazil is destroying the forest. The continued presence and active involvement of the CPT was clear during my fieldwork as well. The CPT has had an active office in Santarém for several decades, and I encountered international and Brazilian scholars and activists associated with the organization on multiple occasions in and around Santarém when foreigners and southern Brazilians gathered to socialize. They were working with the CPT in the same rural communities where I was conducting interviews, although they were speaking with the small-scale farmers and I was speaking with the large-scale landowners. The presence of international scientists working with the Large Scale BiosphereAtmosphere Experiment in Amazônia (LBA) generated a great deal of concern among the 187

large-scale landowners, as false rumors circulated about Americans working with the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) to seize their lands and remove everyone from their farms as a precursor to an American invasion. The document “The ‘Green Mafia’ fights against the Central-West/Amazon corridor” (Figure 7.8) circulated widely among the farmers. This brochure included “The strategic significance of the Central-West/Amazon corridor,” which argued that the South American continent could have a dynamic new phase of economic development with better infrastructure and that this potential was frightening to Americans and Europeans. Another article, “Who are the ‘Heads of Neocolonialism’?” explains the anti-development agendas of Friends of Earth, Conservation International, The Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA), and IPAM. A group based in Rio de Janeiro with a vague title, “The Latin American Solidarity Movement,” published the document. In the document, conservation organizations are linked variously to a shadowy group called The World Federalists (they intend to eliminate national sovereignty), the United States Department of Agriculture, and various American and European corporations purported to have an interest in limiting the growth of the Brazilian economy. The central idea of the document is summed up in the group’s outrage at a letter sent by environmental organizations to President DaSilva in October 2003 calling for an end to infrastructure projects in the Amazon: “An analysis of the origins, agendas and resource flows of the main NGOs signing the letter to President DaSilva shows that, under the screen of ‘environmental protection,’ hides the defense of strategic and geopolitical interests outside the Country” (Lino 2003).

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Source: Lino 2003 Figure 7.8. An opinion pamphlet, “The ‘Green Mafia’ fights against the CentralWest/Amazon corridor,” widely circulated among Amazon farmers. The document built on a long-standing belief that an agenda existed to remove control of the Amazon from Brazilians. In interviews, landowners often asked if I had seen the map indicating that the Amazon was going to be an “International Reserve” controlled by the United Nations following an invasion by the United States (Figure 7.9). The goal of this invasion was supposedly to take over the Amazon and set it aside as a global ecological reserve as a pretext for wealthy nations to claim Brazil’s freshwater, pharmaceutical, and 189

mineral wealth. I would hope that this scenario is as far-fetched as it sounded the first time I heard it. A few publications describing this secret plan circulated among the farmers, and local radio programs talked about it regularly. The map can easily be found on the internet and supposedly was a page scanned from geography textbooks used by Americans. While the map was not universally known, the conspiracy of an impending American invasion was widely believed. Besides the attention created by the media in regard to deforestation driven by soybean expansion, periodic episodes of violence also captured the attention of those outside the region, and became emblematic of how “The Amazon is still a wild, mostly lawless region” (The New York Times 2005). In 2005, during the initial stages of my fieldwork, the American nun Dorothy Strang was assassinated in southern Pará, and this assassination drew a great deal of international attention to the state. She was working with an NGO in southern Pará with smallholders and other impoverished residents to establish a sustainably managed ecological reserve in an area (Terra do Meio) that a local landowner wanted to develop for profit. The reports of her death often mentioned the expansion of soybeans in Pará State, even though the area where she was working was not an area with mechanized agriculture. During the first few months after this assassination, nearly every interview I conducted with a large-scale landowner began with the landowner’s asking if I was trying to blame them for the American nun’s murder, and they were sure that I knew her, despite my denials. Some of them found it difficult to believe that I was not familiar with another American working in the region. Their sensitivity may have been due to the way media reports suggested that “large landowners” were behind the assassination, without any further specificity. The murder of Chico Mendes at the hands of large-scale 190

landowners many years earlier was also a common element of these reports. While some landowners were clearly willing to resort to violence to achieve their goals, the wider population of large-scale landowners also felt unfairly targeted by foreigners and NGOs.

Source: Jacobs 2007, p. 76 Figure 7.9. Map showing the Amazon as an international forest reserve.

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Part 2: Policy Debates Centered on the Question of Infrastructure While, for environmentalists and social activists, the jungle falling before tractors and murderous large-scale landowners’ gunning down nuns were the main points of reference in the public and media debates about the Amazon, the concern with soybean expansion coalesced for scholars around the issue of infrastructure (Alencar et al. 2005; Fearnside 2007; Nepstad et al. 2001). The question of how investments in the BR-163 CuiabaSantarém highway should be handled was seen as a key policy question in the debate about development in the region (Oliveira and Torres 2005). The highway is still unpaved and non-trafficable for part of the year. Because past infrastructure projects have resulted in consistently high levels of deforestation, people were reasonably concerned that this project would have the same result (Binswanger 1991; Guimarães and Uhl 1998; Nepstad, et al. 2001; Pfaff 1999). There has been a considerable amount of publication and research on this topic (Fearnside 2001, 2007; Nepstad et al. 2006; Oliveira and Torres 2005). The use of GIS software to forecast changes due to infrastructure projects has led to a greater ability to make specific and seemingly more objective policy recommendations and critiques. For instance, in a recent study, Vera-Diaz et al. (2009) showed that paving BR163 would expand the area where soybeans are viable from 120,000 to 205,000 km2. The specific areas affected by this new infrastructure investment are mapped out within the article, showing specific areas alongside the roadway with a high likelihood of becoming more viable for soybean agriculture with highway investment. This degree of spatial specificity and the ability to visually represent the “threat” provides both scholars and activists with tools in their struggle to prevent further soybean expansion. Scholars are aware of the strong interest of activists in opposing plans to improve BR-163, and seem to 192

view these activists as allies in a common struggle. “Environmental groups and other members of civil society have been very proactive in raising the issue of the social and environmental impacts associated with this investment” (Vera-Diaz et al. 2009). While policy advocates were able to mobilize new technologies to argue that infrastructure investments would increase deforestation rates, policy concerns voiced by Brazilian elected officials and within government agencies were focused initially on the economic impact of soybean expansion. Local policy was caught between supporting development and ensuring that class divisions were not exacerbated. In an interview in 2005, the mayor of Santarém suggested that the previous administration was enthusiastic in supporting the arrival of farmers but failed to anticipate the changes brought about by their arrival. They were interested in attracting the farmers, but did not “support” them with local resources. With this argument, she highlighted her support for development while also distinguishing her administration from the prior one by suggesting that it is more socially responsible. She stressed her advocacy for policies that would provide support for small-scale development (such as a program to encourage local smallholders to grow produce for sale in supermarkets) and policies that are supportive of large-scale farmers and the local elite, although she identified the farmers she was supporting as “medium-scale landowners” and referred to the local elite as “business owners.” These labels helped her avoid the twin dangers of a deeply suspicious and somewhat class-conscious electorate (bolstered by an obviously class-conscious social activist network) on one side and a politically active landowning elite on the other.

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Federal policy, especially in terms of the cooperation of INCRA and IBAMA, appeared to be supportive of “pro-development” policies during the II Encontro de Agronegocios (The Second Annual Agribusiness Conference), in the summer of 2003, but had apparently shifted course under President Da Silva by the time I returned in 2005. During the conference in 2003, both organizations sent senior staff to the event. They gave speeches in which they spoke of the positive possibilities for cooperation between policies supporting agriculture and environmental policy. The new manager of the regional IBAMA offices arrived in late 2004, and responded to calls for increased enforcement by requiring much stricter attention to the existing environmental laws. This sharply reduced the number of permissions granted to landowners in Santarém. The landowners felt betrayed by what appeared to them to be a coldly political calculation of aligning with environmental political pressure by foreigners. INCRA turned its attention toward the development of new settlement areas along the Curuá-Una River, as concerns about rural depopulation increased. The lack of adequate staffing and funding at INCRA meant that business outside the focus on these new settlement areas was handled very slowly or was sometimes ignored. Again, the large-scale landowners suggested the shift in attention at INCRA and their lack of available personnel for land deals related to agribusiness was intended to stop development in order to appease the conservationists and social activists. A third area of Brazilian government policy concern revolves around the license of the port of Santarém, which was brought into question by environmentalists, producing some anxiety about the future of Cargill in the region. These anxieties have proven to be quite

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justified, as the port facilities operated by Cargill were shut down in 2007 due to the result of a legal challenge by Greenpeace and others. The federal courts soon reversed the decision, and the port began operation again.

The Fight against Soybeans in Santarém Press accounts focused on rising deforestation rates and brutal assassinations. The policy environment shifted from enthusiastically welcoming agribusiness to strategically supportive of agribusiness among several policy goals at the local level. At the federal level, INCRA and IBAMA were increasingly obstructive of agribusiness in Santarém. Because of all these trends, landowners began to feel targeted and threatened, and the perception of an outside threat began to shift the relationship between the local elite and Gaúchos. Their perceptions of and interactions with two distinct environmental NGOs active in Santarém—Greenpeace and The Nature Conservancy (TNC), however, proved to be a more important catalyst in changing the relationship between the two groups of landowners. The contrasting strategies of Greenpeace and TNC in Santarém have had strong but distinct effects, which when taken together brought the local elite and Gaúchos together.

Greenpeace Environmentalists have a range of visions and goals related to the best future for the Amazon. Greenpeace exemplifies one of the most boldly pro-environment visions among these organizations. In reaction to the expansion of soybean agriculture into the region, 195

they initiated a campaign against soy in the Amazon. Due to the confrontational tactics they employed, the debate between pro-development advocates (such as large-scale landowners) and activists (the Church, other environmentalists, etc.) became polarized. TNC, on the other hand, has a more practical approach to finding ways to slow the loss of forest in the Amazon. As part of this less strident approach, they formed a partnership with Cargill. They received some criticism from other environmental organizations because this partnership involved a degree of compromise. Greenpeace made soybean farming in the Amazon one of their key campaigns beginning in 2004. Their actions included protests in Europe and materials circulated in America and Europe intended to sway American and European consumers. As part of the same campaign, they conducted protests in the Amazon intended to register their opposition to soybean agriculture, with the additional advantage of providing images of the confrontation they generate for donors and the media in Europe and America. The landowners were upset by their activities, such as their previous, unsuccessful attempt to hang an anti-soy banner on the Cargill facility in 2004 or a film, “Amasoja” which claims that soybean farming is responsible for poverty in the region. They planned to show the film publicly in Santarém and had contingency plans in place because they felt this event could incite violence. During my fieldwork, Greenpeace was well known by nearly all of the landowners and was the example they mentioned to me when they complained about “environmentalists.” Some of the large-scale landowners were very upset at the influence of foreign activists and some even said that they considered Greenpeace to be a “terrorist” or “criminal” organization

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bent on destroying the economy of Santarém as part of the previously mentioned secret American plot to control the Amazon and steal its wealth. The 2005 film “Amasoja” features exposé-style interviews with unsuspecting local farmers (D’Imperio 2005). The interviews were particularly upsetting for the farmers featured in the film because they had been told that the interviews were going to be used to provide low-interest loans for their farms by a Swiss bank. The false premise was verified to me in a series of interviews with the man who had acted as translator and guide for the filmmakers. He was an odd man who claims to have given up a considerable fortune in France and lived alone in a scavenged homestead outside Santarém. He was very proud to have fooled the farmers and told me that he was justified by the importance of ridding the Amazon of soy farmers. In 2006, they launched a series of direct actions to shut down the Cargill facility in Santarém by invading farms, and doing “fly-overs” when the farmers were out working in the fields. Their boldest action involved blocking the Cargill port with their famous ship, Arctic Sunrise (Figure 7.10) and holding public demonstrations that resulted in the arrest of 17 mostly European environmentalists (Figure 7.11).

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Source: Greenpeace 2006c Figure 7.10. Greenpeace using their ship The Arctic Sunrise to block the port in Santarém. A boat from Santarém is in the foreground, trying to push the Greenpeace boat back from the Cargill port facility.

Source: Greenpeace 2006c Figure 7.11. Greenpeace activists being arrested in Santarém. 198

In 2006, they also launched a series of protests and media campaigns aimed at Western consumers (Greenpeace 2006a). In this campaign, Greenpeace portrayed the cultivation of soybeans as a crime (Figure 7.12) and associated farmers in the Amazon with illegal destruction and slave labor. This campaign was based on a proven strategy of establishing a belief among Americans and Europeans that there was a social and environmental crisis in the Amazon, blaming the crisis on immoral landowners, linking those landowners to multinational agriculture corporations and then linking these multinational agribusinesses with retail fast-food operations. In the case of the 2006 anti-soybean campaign, they focused on Cargill as the evil multinational agriculture business with McDonalds and KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken) as the irresponsible retail operations (Figures 7.13 and 7.14). In their literature, they claimed that the animal feed was produced using soy grown in the Amazon (Greenpeace 2006a). Greenpeace has been effective by translating consumer outrage instigated by their campaign into pressure against the retail outlets. The retail outlets responded quickly to the Greenpeace campaign and this put pressure on Cargill to address the claims made by Greenpeace.

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Source: Greenpeace 2006b Figure 7.12. A banner hung in a farmer’s field.

Source: Greenpeace 2006a Figure 7.13. Flyer produced by Greenpeace to be distributed in England for their anti-soy campaign.

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Source: Greenpeace 2006b Figure 7.14. A banner hung in a farmer’s field indicating a link between multinational agribusiness and fast-food chains.

The Nature Conservancy TNC has pursued a very different tactic compared to Greenpeace, although their goals are also centered on the preservation of intact rainforest in the Amazon. They use a marketbased approach to their preservation goals, working with Cargill to ensure they buy their soybeans only from farmers who have clear title to their lands and have received permission to clear the forest from the Brazilian environmental protection agency IBAMA. Those farmers who are not in compliance can join a program to reforest or rehabilitate their land to bring it up to the legal standards in Brazil.

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This program is interesting in that the forest code in Brazil is actually very strict, with permission to clear land being granted only with clear title and at least 80% (and some additional specified zones) set aside as an area of permanent preservation. The code has never been adequately enforced, however, due to funding limitations in the administrative agencies and the vast territorial responsibility of enforcement personnel. The idea that voluntary compliance with the law could bring about improved environmental conditions was a new approach, which seems likely to succeed. Of course, for the farmers, TNC is seen in a much better light than Greenpeace. TNC has been very sophisticated and careful in how they approach their relationships with the farmers. The program was developed and begun while David Cleary, an anthropologist with a long history in the region, was the head of the regional TNC office in Belém. His familiarity with the cultural context of farming and bureaucracy in the region was obviously an important element in being able to craft a strategy that accommodated the perspectives of the many Brazilian government agencies, farmers from southern Brazil, and local leaders in Santarém. The ability to build a consensus based on a partnership with Cargill was the key element, because Cargill was trusted by the grain farmers and that partnership helped TNC gain the trust of the soybean farmers. Interestingly, in the local political taxonomy, the Gaúchos do not consider TNC to be an environmental organization. The farmers would often rail against NGOs and their presence in the region, but then change their tone when TNC came up. Paraphrasing a common complaint, “All these NGOs are working against us. The group with Cargill is willing to listen to us at least.” Working with Cargill meant that TNC was associated with

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development and agriculture. The farmers saw TNC as an organization that understood their concerns because the field coordinator of the TNC soy project, and the main contact farmers had with TNC in Santarém, Benito Guerrero, had a background in tropical agriculture.

The Alliance Is Formed Differences Remain between Local Elite and Gaúchos, but Utility of Alliance Is Clear The perception of a renewed threat from environmentalists and social activists drew the local elite and Gaúchos together despite their differences. In combining their resources, the Gaúchos and the local elite could both become more influential in the important debates about development, deforestation, and social justice. A more cooperative relationship between the two groups would improve their ability to shape the future of the region. Prior to the perceived threat by environmentalists, the farmers and ranchers already interacted in a limited capacity, and these social interactions formed the first basis of their growing cooperation. Later in this section, I will explain this process and the reasons for it after first noting some of the obstacles to cooperation. One of the primary obstacles was the difference in their cultural models of proper economic behavior, as I described in Chapters 5 and 6. To summarize, the Gaúchos are aggressive and driven to find new opportunities and see Brazil in the context of the global economy. The local ranchers use family networks to limit their exposure to periodic bust cycles, without missing out on boom cycles, and their sense of “place” is more regional.

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Concerns with the irregularities and dramatic swings in the local economy dominate the economic logic of the local elite, while a concern with national economic performance and optimism about the inevitability of progress are the cornerstones for the Gaúchos’ economic perspective. There are both practical and ideological barriers to greater cooperation and a stronger sense of shared identity.

Obstacles to a Closer Relationship between Farmers and Ranchers Both groups produce food commodities, but their primary commodities are connected to local and global markets in differing ways. Soybeans are connected directly to a global industrial food system through Cargill, while beef production in the Amazon is very poorly connected to external markets due to poor infrastructure, a government-issued quarantine on beef from the region, and concerns by buyers about the quality and health of the meat from the region. This means that changes in global markets and variations in demand in distant locations have an immediate impact on the economic context of soybean production. For the local elite, however, ranching takes place in an economic context that is shaped by local policies and local infrastructure. The nature of vaccine programs, for example, changes the market for beef more directly than increases in demand for pasturefed beef in Europe. The difference in how Gaúchos and the local elite are linked to food commodity chains is compounded by differences in their relationships to their land. The local elite use farm ownership as one of several investments, part of a portfolio, while the Gaúchos see the land as a factor of production and seek larger scales to achieve greater returns. 204

Beyond the practical issues related to differences in their economic positions, the local elite and Gaúchos are somewhat divergent in the ways they evaluate their social positions. A local elite person is concerned with the development of his or her life, their ability to grow and flourish within the context of the boom-and-bust cycles and the untapped potential of the region. The Gaúchos, on the other hand, see themselves as the harbingers of progress as part of an expanding and modernizing Brazil. Their geographic frame of reference and their sense of what constitutes success are therefore distinct from those of the local elite. These differences are also related to the ways these two types of rural elite are socially articulated. The local elite have strong local ties through their family and workers, as well as the social ties and connections between important families. Among the local large-scale landowners, there is a shared class interest in the success of urban businesses and the land market, and in raising cattle. This class interest may translate into a cooperative set of relationships and a shared view on important political issues, but they are involved in many different types of economic activities. These include shipping, retail businesses, wholesale businesses, agricultural production or processing, and even manufacturing businesses. They are diverse in terms of the economic sectors they are engaged in, but they are geographically concentrated. Their shared goals and social status are relevant primarily within the geographic confines of the Lower Amazon. In contrast, the Gaúchos have a strong social network extending throughout Brazil. Many have family and close friends who remain in the South and the Central West. They have ongoing relationships in other areas experiencing rapid growth in the agricultural sector,

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including Bahia, Rondônia, and Amapá. Their status and connections are economically concentrated in mechanized agriculture, but geographically dispersed. The local elite also have strong ties with other social classes, in contrast to the Gaúchos. They acknowledge a wide range of responsibilities and these responsibilities are part of the expectation that comes with their high social status. Some of these responsibilities and relationships were described in greater detail in Chapters 4 and 6. The Gaúcho’s frame of reference for their social status is more closely related to the role of industrial agriculture on a national scale.

Basis for Beginnings Despite these barriers to finding common interests, both groups shared a common position and ideology of resistance when it came to issues of development, deforestation, and social justice. In discussing the question of deforestation, they shared a sense of outrage at the presence and influence of non-Brazilians in debates about the future of the Amazon, although the local elite were more measured in expressing their concerns about foreigners. Both groups shared a common vision of economic expansion in Pará and modernization of the infrastructure in Santarém. Beyond this ideological common ground, there were some settings where they shared each other’s company and interacted socially, and this led to growing familiarity. One of the most striking areas of agreement came in reference to their critique of land reform, which is based on an argument that a capitalized land user offers many advantages

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to the productivity of the landscape that would be absent if the land and wealth were more evenly shared. They highlight their ability to make investments that benefit the wider community and how they use their influence to improve government services. Some examples of investments and improved services that they shared with me include bridge and road repairs and upgrades, more elaborate and secure grain storage (including their poorer neighbors’ crops) and improved electricity provision. In their critique of land reform, they suggested that having a few landowners with greater means creates more favorable conditions for these investments, improving the lives of their poorer neighbors in the process. There was a great deal of consistency in this argument among both ranchers and farmers. The successes of environmentalists and social activists in framing the debate about soybeans in the national and international presses as a threat to the future of the global climate, and as a consequence of the lawlessness and outlaw nature of people in the Amazon were noticed by both the local elite and the Gaúchos. The arguments made by foreign environmentalists and the circulation of pro-environmentalist concerns in the media rekindled an old grudge for the local elite, who blamed foreign interests for the end of Brazilian development efforts in the 1980s. The parallels between the “missed opportunity” for development then and the current debate were mentioned frequently in interviews. They expressed fear that another opportunity was being derailed. In particular, Greenpeace’s campaign against soybean farmers, struck a nerve for the local elite. Once again, they became concerned that non-Brazilian interests were intent on making a claim on the territory and resources of Brazil. The local elite began to see the

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soybean farmers more empathetically as they saw the parallel between their prior efforts to develop the region and the efforts of Gaúchos. Because the current “threat” to Gaúchos from environmentalists reminded them of prior efforts to dampen the development of the region, their sense of solidarity with the Gaúchos grew. There were some emerging areas of social interaction among the local elite and the Gaúchos. There were two cases of intermarriage that I was aware of between recently arrived Gaúchos and local elite families, but there were some examples of high school aged Gaúchos dating local women. One of the wives who followed her husband to Santarém after he set up his farm complained that the Gaúchos were having affairs with the local women, who she described as “aggressive and unsophisticated.” She thought the men would find it difficult to leave their wives for them, however, because they aren’t as educated or business-minded as Gaúcho women. There was one joint business venture that I learned about, and it was in an early stage. The men congregate together, however, at the Rural Union meetings and at public forums related to economic development and environmental policy. Their shared ideas about the nature of the threat to their goals in the region and their common arguments were both on full display in these settings. At the Rural Union they felt freer to speak openly about their concerns. The restricted admission to those meetings helped them exclude critics. At the meeting I attended, the local landowners outnumbered the Gaúchos with about thirty ranchers and less than a dozen farmers. In Santarém the Worker’s Party (PT) (the federal and municipal governments were both PT at the time) held participatory democracy meetings drawn from the model used in Porto 208

Alegre (Menegat 2002). These “Public Forums” were well advertized throughout the city and brought together a wide range of local actors (Figure 7.15). Documents that were intended to direct policy were created in real-time using an LCD projector based on elements drawn together from various “break-out sessions.” In one example I attended, the break-out sessions included environmental protection, agricultural development, community impact, infrastructure, and social justice and inclusion. Items were generated from these sessions and then assembled and edited when the group met together in a large conference room. There were several forums in 2005, and more than 200 participants attended both forums in which I participated. These meetings were another setting where the farmers and ranchers came together. They would gather together before the meeting began to discuss the politics and problems related to the theme of the forum. They seemed to be represented in each of the break-out groups, as well, although I didn’t verify this in every instance. It was a sign of their growing trust that some break-out sessions included only farmers or only ranchers, but when they would came back together to edit the documents, they collaborated again to suggest edits in the large group setting (Figures 7.16 and 7.17). While the participatory democracy model is seen as a means to distribute political power, in this instance it was a way for two different rural elites to find common ground and collaborate.

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Figure 7.15. A poster for one of the public forums related to the debate about paving the BR-163 Highway.

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Figure 7.16. Large-scale landowners attending a participatory democracy “Public Forum” meeting in Santarém.

Figure 7.17 Large-scale landowners participate in a public forum related to paving the BR-163 Highway.

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Gaúchos and the local elite had been involved with one another in real estate transactions and land sales. Gaúchos purchased homes from the local elite when they moved to the city. New housing was often built by companies owned by a member of one of the local ranching families. Some Gaúchos purchased or assembled their farms from smaller properties the local elite had acquired or purchased. Some of the local elite had acquired medium- and small-scale farms in order to resell the land as a land agent, as an investment without explicit plans to resell in the short term or as part of a plan to expand their ranches. In any case, it was exceptionally rare for a large-scale ranch to be sold to a Gaúcho to convert into a large-scale farm, but the local elite sometimes sold smaller properties to Gaúchos. I previously mentioned a number of businesses with a secondary connection to agriculture that the local elite had invested in (Chapter 6). These businesses brought the local elite into contact with the Gaúchos who were clients, for example, at car dealerships, gas stations, parts supply stores, hardware and construction supply stores, and restaurants. This relationship between the Gaúcho’s as clients of local businesses was significant in building a sense of trust and familiarity between the two groups.

Cooperative as a Symbolic Statement The most important event in the coalescence of the two groups of landowners into a single elite social class was the establishment of the Amazon Agro-Industrial Cooperative “CooperAmazon,” which was the first cooperative to be formed in Santarém. The cooperative was launched with a ceremony in November 2005 (Figure 7.18) and was intended to serve as a way for the farmers to collectively purchase supplies, such as 212

fertilizer and lime, and to negotiate better prices for their crops. They hoped to eventually store rice, corn, and other crops (excluding soy, which is sold quickly to Cargill and exported, avoiding the necessity of storage). In 2007, CooperAmazon launched a project to produce biodiesel, potentially giving the farmers another buyer for their soy production, although biodiesel can also be made from other crops. The cooperative is designed to be able to fund these kinds of capital-intensive and potentially lucrative projects. It is modeled after successful cooperatives found elsewhere in the agricultural areas of Brazil (Jepson 2006a).

Figure 7.18. The ceremony launching CooperAmazon in Santarém, November 2005.

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Another key element of a cooperative is that they allow the farmers to collectively participate in public debates. The desire to form a cooperative was certainly heightened by the collective sense of being embattled politically. While the farmers and ranchers were active in public policy debates, having an official organization that represents their views can be a powerful tool in shaping public opinion. CooperAmazon represents the coming together of the two groups of landowners because it was formed under the aegis of the Rural Union. It was initially a primarily Gaúcho organization, and the leadership of the Rural Union were from the important local families. By forming CooperAmazon under the umbrella of the Rural Union, the Gaúchos conveyed a certain amount of respect to the local elite, who were in strong attendance at the opening ceremony. This sign of mutual respect goes a long way toward mending the impression among some of the local elite, that the Gaúchos were arrogant. In addition, the interaction between these two groups was increased in a practical sense because the cooperative was physically situated alongside the Rural Union on the fairgrounds campus east of the city center. The involvement of Gaúchos in matters related to the Rural Union can be expected to increase and they will come in contact with the local ranchers far more often as they begin frequenting the cooperative. The same holds true for the local elite who now have a more accessible connection to the Gaúchos.

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Why an Alliance? In conclusion, I would like to explain the motivations and underlying causes of this alliance. I provide three primary explanations. First, the Gaúchos and local elite have come together in response to a threat from forces they perceive to be external to both. In seeing the threat as lying outside a social identity that they share, they were able to see themselves as belonging to the same social group. Second, the Gaúchos have begun to assume some of the responsibilities associated with their class position in Santarém. Third, the opportunities provided by the arrival of large-scale agriculture have begun to inspire some of the local elite to make greater investments in ranching and agriculture-related ventures. The assumption of social class responsibilities by Gaúchos and the reduced aversion to risk by the local elite represent a greater unity of vision in reference to their social roles for the two groups of rural elite.

Coming Together in the Face of an Outside Threat: Segmented Kinship as Analogy Environmentalists and social activists came out strongly against the expansion of soybeans into Santarém. In making their argument, the Gaúchos and the local elite were both blamed for unequal land distribution, the loss of rural communities, and rising deforestation. At the same time, both the Gaúchos and the local elite sought to modernize Santarém and increase economic investments. Having a shared position in the debate about the future of the Amazon and Santarém allowed the ranchers and farmers to see past their differences.

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Anthropologists have studied the way in which two groups of people faced with a threat exterior to both groups can bring themselves together in opposition to the threat (EvansPritchard 1940; Sahlins 1961). The principle of segmentary kinship is thus a useful analogue to this situation and helps explain why the Gaúchos and local elite, who are dissimilar in many respects and occasionally hostile in their depictions of each other, would make such a strong effort to cooperate and in some ways unify. The concept of segmentary kinship was developed by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) in his study of the Nuer people of Sudan and by Laura and Paul Bohannan (1953) in their study of the Tiv. In a review of Evans-Pritchard’s book, P. Amaury Talbot (1942, p. 42) describes this system: “The members of any segment unite for war against adjacent segments of the same order and also with these adjacent segments against larger sections.” Sahlins (1961) notes that the key to the development of this type of system is the absence of a permanent higher-level leadership structure above the lineages that unite. Because the threats may emerge and dissipate, the leadership and alliance will also form and dissolve. In the case of Gaúchos and ranchers, three shared elements of their identity acted to ally them in the face of external threats: (1) they were Brazilians facing criticism from nonBrazilians, (2) they were “productive” facing calls for land reform and redistribution, and (3) they were committed to economic growth facing calls for a more limited, regionally based economy and limits to infrastructure investments.

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Gaúchos Assume Local Responsibilities, Local Elite Take on More Economic Risk Most of the large-scale landowners I interviewed had a very highly developed sense of justice and went to great lengths to explain how their position presented them with responsibilities and obligations that often were unmatched to their economic means. Their success in status had to be matched with economic power or political control in ways that placed great strains on their time and resources. This is best exemplified in the adoption of greater patron/client responsibility by Gaúchos. When Gaúchos first arrived in the Santarém area, most of their employees were from outside the region. This created resentment locally, as the availability of jobs was less than rural residents expected. The problem, from the Gaúchos’ perspective, was that the training and expertise of the local population was not adequate to the task at hand. As the Gaúchos began cooperating and spending more time with the local elite, however, they learned more about the importance of building connections and fostering more goodwill among their poorer neighbors. Toward the end of my time in the field, I encountered several Gaúchos who had hired locals to work on their farms. In interviews, these farmers emphasized their intention to become long-term residents and establish themselves in Santarém, when they discussed these workers. Early in my fieldwork, I found some examples of Gaúchos reluctantly hiring local workers or neighbors, but not interacting with them with the same degree of intimacy that I saw among local ranchers. During this time a member of the local elite explained to me why it was important to involve their poorer neighbors in the farm operations. He said this was a lesson that the Gaúchos should learn. The landowners discussed how the poorer neighbors 217

were eager to be connected with them and that this was positive, because it creates a more peaceful community. They never mentioned threats or anger on the part of poorer neighbors, as this was framed in exclusively positive terms. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I heard this same idea being expressed and agreed upon by a group of local landowners and Gaúchos. Within less than a year, the goal of involving poorer neighbors in much of the farm work had moved from a local practice rooted in social class identity, and something the Gaúchos were not doing, to an idea that was held in common by both groups of landowners. In practicing a type of reciprocity that was locally recognized as an expected part of what it meant to be a large landowner, the Gaúchos became more similar to the local elite. In Chapter 6, I noted several new business ventures embarked on by the local elite. These included improvements on their rural properties, improvements in their cattle stock, investments in urban real estate, expansion and relocation of their businesses, and opening new ventures in areas related to agriculture. Although they remain cautious relative to the Gaúchos, it is clear to see that the arrival of the Gaúchos and mechanized agriculture has inspired them to pursue new investments. They have thus moved closer to the Gaúchos in their economic outlook.

Policy Implications My research has several policy implications, but chief among them is the clear demonstration that global agribusiness and global environmental activism have a

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tremendous amount of power in Santarém and are able to shape the behavior of large-scale landowners. It is likely that global agribusiness companies operating in the Amazon, such as Cargill, will continue to cooperate with environmentalists to limit their exposure to American and European consumer backlash. One common way that companies do this is to use a third-party certification scheme (Tanner 2000), such as the endorsement “Maya Gold” chocolate receives from the Fairtrade Foundation (Coe and Coe 2007). “Green & Black’s has gambled that an increasingly aware chocolate-loving public will be willing to pay extra for a more ‘ethically-correct’ product” (Coe and Coe 2007, p. 266). The “ethically correct” standard can vary, whether that is organic, fair-trade, local or environmentally certified. Each of these standards carries with it particular challenges in terms of certification for consumers (Barrientos and Dolan 2006). The ethical issue consumers have with soy grown in the Amazon is related to deforestation, so certifying that the soy did not cause deforestation is the most important element in reference to Cargill’s image (Cargill 2006; Cleary 2006). The effect may be limited geographically to the Amazon, because “eco-labeling” without reference to a specific location to be protected has not been effective in generating a price premium for the garment industry (Nimon and Beghin 1999). Because the forest can be cheaply monitored using satellite images, the power of Cargill as a monopoly buyer of soy ensures that sizable areas of rainforest are conserved without costing Cargill a great deal (Cleary 2006). There are important limits to the benefits of this policy approach, however. The biological health of the forest that remains is not part of the certification system, which is based on simply maintaining the existence of forest. The lack of fine-scale biological health indicators

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is one of the problems with timber certification schemes (Bennett 2001) and is a critique of the TNC/Cargill market-based approach in the Amazon as well (Higgins et al. 2006). Another drawback to this certification arrangement is that indirect deforestation caused by soybeans that are grown on land that was once cleared may lead to forest clearing by those formerly located on the land used to grow soybeans, or to investments in infrastructure that lead to increased deforestation on land not being used to grow soybeans (Rausch 2009). Princen’s (2002) concepts of “distancing” and “shading” provide a good explanation for why consumers would be unaware of the conditions of production for the soybeans used to feed the animals they consume in fast-food restaurants. Distancing is the effect caused by the loss of information about the context of production when that production takes place far from where the product is consumed. Shading is the practice of highlighting the positive attributes of a product while downplaying or concealing the negative aspects of it. Through these practices, companies like Cargill can avoid responsibility for the ecological and social consequences of their products’ production. The vertical integration of global agribusiness companies allows them to dominate global agricultural commodity trade; however, the same vertical integration leaves them vulnerable to consumer pressure. Cargill copes with this, in part, through the use of subsidiary companies that are not easily connected to the Cargill brand (Kneen 2002). When the momentum of public opinion is strong, however, these techniques are of limited value. “While tortuous multiagent chains can still conceal the ultimate origins of goods like ivory and drugs from the strictest regulations, with the support of strong public opinion,

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large integrated companies can indeed be forced to divulge their sources of supply” (Wilk 2008, p. 107). The consumers of meat raised on feed using Amazon-grown soy protein are no more aware of the real lives of the farmers or the conditions of production of the soybeans, but the concerns raised by Greenpeace bridged the gap and put tremendous pressure on Cargill. Because the pressure dissipated after the rainforest conservation plan was announced by TNC and Cargill, other aspects of production (labor practices, pesticide use, etc.) are once again hidden from the consumer.

Patron/Client Relationship and Economic Development A second area of policy that this research informs is related to the potential for economic development that is aligned with the behavior and ideals of the rural elite. Because the local elite distribute risk and the Gaúchos aggressively pursue new opportunities, there are some economic development schemes that are better suited to Santarém, including the production of fish on farms and processing and selling fruit pulp. For economic growth in the large-scale agricultural and ranching sectors to result in better opportunities for the majority of people in the region, synergistic or related activities that can employ larger numbers of people are needed. An obvious example described in Chapters 5 and 6 are the businesses and jobs in sectors supporting agriculture. As local employees become more skilled, it would become easier for a farmer to hire locally. Some of these positions have the earning potential for a middle-class life in Santarém.

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Animal production operations, including hogs and chickens, could also be scaled up with the presence of grain operations making feed prices lower. When soybeans are exported in bulk, much of the final value is lost because the animals are raised for meat elsewhere. If feed were produced locally, using part of the soybean crop, it could provide new job opportunities in the local economy and an alternative to selling grain to Cargill. Because Cargill is the only current buyer of soybeans, the company has a great deal of power to set the price locally, and the farmers have no alternative but to produce according to Cargill’s terms. There is one local chicken producer already in place, and a handful of farmers raise hogs, but additional animal operations could create a positive outcome for Santarém. Fish production, for instance, could generate rural income and is suited to the types of patron/client relations that exist in Santarém. Water retention ponds are important to ranchers as sources of water for their cattle, especially during dry years (Moran et al. 2006). Fish are raised in these ponds and caught and sold by clients, who receive some compensation from the landowners. The idea that fish production could be a source of income in the region has been explored before (e.g., Goulding et al. 1996). The availability of grain due to the growth of mechanized agriculture could make feed for farmed fish cheaper and provide more work for the clients who tend the ponds and catch the fish. Another sector that could involve an investment in new opportunities that align with the nature of patron/client relationships in the region and that could create synergistic economic growth is frozen fruit pulp. One local rancher has already begun exploring a venture involving her poorer neighbors to collect and process fruit and freeze the pulp. Her neighbors had approached her to ask her to invest in this equipment after realizing that the

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abundance of the fruit available locally could not be consumed while it was ripe, but they did not have the means to buy the equipment needed to ship the fruit as frozen pulp. The landowner is interested in buying the equipment to get this business started. The açaí market provides an example of local fruit production that may serve as an analogy for the potential of fruit pulp from Santarém. I expect there would be inequality in the income for various actors in a fruit pulp production chain based in Santarém, but it also has the potential to provide income to rural communities. “Producers in the estuarine region, while seeing some investments in pulp processing plants, are not taking full advantage of the profitable commercialization and transformation sectors, but rather are staying with the raw material side of supply” (Brondízio 2008, p. 274). Just as Brondízio notes in terms of the underutilized investment opportunity for local processing with Açaí, fruit pulp production could be made possible through investments by large landowners. There are two reasons they would be interested in making these investments. First, it represents a way for them to diversify following the local elite strategy of spreading their strategies across various activities. More importantly, it could make use of the forest reserves soybean farmers have agreed to maintain. Besides a large reserve that is sometimes purchased distant from the soybean farm, farmers must set aside other areas of their land that cannot be cleared, such as areas along streams, in order to be allowed to sell their soy to Cargill. Many of these areas have already been cleared and will need to be reforested, and several farmers were interested in reforesting with fruit-bearing trees. The work of harvesting and processing this fruit could present an opportunity for work in rural communities.

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Future Research In this final section, I address areas of potential research for the future. The cooperation and integration between the local elite and Gaúchos was tentative. An area of future research could explore the direction this integration has taken. It was not clear, for instance, if some of the Gaúchos were resistant to CooperAmazon and to aligning themselves with the Rural Union. The local elite were far more involved in local politics and there were no Gaúchos among the senior government officials. I expect this will change and divisions may emerge as the Gaúchos become involved in local politics. The fact that the “Responsible Soy” project was able to absorb the environmentalist critique of mechanized agriculture may have alleviated some of the pressure on farmers, as well, resulting in a reduced incentive to remain allied with the local elite. Once the threat has been reduced, will the Gaúchos and local elite divide and focus their attention on their distinctive agendas rather than their common enemies, as in a segmentary linage? The Gaúchos and the local elite have distinct cultural models of economic risk and have different ways of shifting risk. While I was able to collect information about the ways the local elite distributed risk across economic sectors within their families, I would like to understand the ways in which the Gaúchos shift investments and activities within their families. The Gaúchos in Santarém explained that other members of their families were pursuing new frontiers in agriculture elsewhere. This seems to be a way for a family to ensure that it can take advantage of new opportunities for growth as it emerges in various locations. However, it was not clear how the wealth was shared within the family or what 224

would happen if one of the family members were to fail in a new venture. I would like to undertake a multisited analysis of these farming families’ economic and kinship strategies to better understand the way they pursue new agricultural frontiers through the relationships within their families.

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Appendix 1 Migration Trajectories of Soybean Farmers’ Paths to Santarém

-Paraguay – Mutum, Mato Grosso – Rio de Janeiro – Carandai, Sao Paulo – Belo Horizonte, Santarém -Paraná – Santarém -Paraná – Santarém -Paraná – Novo Mutum, Mato Grosso – Santarém -Paraná – Novo Mutum, Mato Grosso – Santarém -Paraná – Novo Mutum, Mato Grosso – Sinop – Santarém -Rio Grande do Sul – Campo Novo, Mato Grosso – Santarém -Rio Grande do Sul – Campo Novo, Mato Grosso – Rio Grande do Sul – Bahia – Santarém -Rio Grande so Sul – Mato Grosso do Sul – Sorriso, Mato Grosso – Santarém -Rio Grande do Sul – Paraná – Paraguai – Sinop(?), Mato Grosso – Santarém -Rio Grande do Sul – Paraná – Sinop, Mato Grosso – Novo Progresso, Para – Roraima Sorriso, Mato Grosso – Santarém -Rio Grande do Sul – Paraná – Mato Grosso do Sul – Sinop, Mato Grosso – Santarém -Rio Grande do Sul – Uruguai – Campo Novo, Mato Grosso – Santarém Santa Catarina – Santarém -Santa Catarina – Lucas do Rio Verde, Mato Grosso – Santarém -Santa Catarina – Novo Mutum, Mato Grosso – Santarém -Santa Catarina – Sorriso, Mato Grosso – Santarém

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Appendix 2 Information Given to Potential Interviewees

“Produtores em Grande Escala em Santarém, Pará State, Brazil” Ryan Thomas Adams, Estudante na Programa Doutorado na Universidade de Indiana Apoio: Comisão Fulbright Apoio Institucional no Brasil: EMPRAPA-CPATU Os Tópicos da Estudo: 1) Grandes produtores da Região Norte (Produtores de grãos e Pecuaristas). 2) Como as pessoas se adaptam às mudanças na economia agrícola. 3) Historias das famílias da Região e das que estão chegando aqui. Por que Santarém? 1) Porto modificado pela Cargill (2002) 2) Rodovia Cuiabá-Santarém (vai ser asfaltada?) 3) Expansão da grãos: Os Produtores dos outros estados chegam “Gaúchos” 4) Potencialidade da Região, por que dizem que a monocultura de soja era impossível nos solos da Amazônia? Por que estudar Antropologia aqui em Santarém? 1) Complementar lacunas dos estudos anteriores (Pesquisadores falam mais com pequenos produtores). 2) Entender como as pessoas vivem (Contra os estereótipos de “Grande Fazendeiro”) 3) Informar políticas públicas com dados científicos (-A economia, -A cultura, -As relações entre pessoas) Literatura acadêmica diz: 1) A Região Norte é uma fronteira do capitalismo 2) Desenvolvimento não dá bastante atenção às condições ecológicas e sociais 3) Quando se melhora a infra-estrutura ou o governo facilita desenvolvimento econômico, sempre causa desmatamento e problemas para os pequenos 4) Santarenas flexíveis usam as novas oportunidades com cada mudança de políticas públicas Meu Estudo examina: 1) Qual são as perspectivas dos produtores? 2) Quais são as relações sociais envolvendo produtores e outros? (Como: Empregado/Empregador, Produtor da Soja/Pecuarista, ONG‟s/Produtores, Gaúcho/Santareno, Corporações MultiNacionais/Produtores) 3) Como os sojeiros e pecuaristas em Santarém são integrados na economia mundial? A Metodologia: 1) Entrevistas: - Produtor na grande escala está definido como o que possui mais de 500 hectares (meu estudo) - Inclusive pecuaristas, produtores mecanizados, lojistas, políticos, e imobiliárias - Totalmente anônimos (proibido usar nomes) 2) Entrevista sobre a historia de vida: 227

- Entender as decisões e as relações entre membros da família - Produzir uma tipologia dos produtores 3) Pesquisa de Biblioteca: - Economia regional com contexto de mercado de produtos agropecuários, e escalas maiores num sentido de tempo e espaço As Metas: 1) Apenas dados de pequenos produtores contribuíram para as teorias de desenvolvimento da região. Eu quero contribuir dados sobre os produtores na grande escala 2) Informar políticas públicas sobre desenvolvimento: Quais são as conseqüências do desenvolvimento baseado em agricultura em grande escala? 3) Etnografia de capitalismo contra Marxismo pode explicar as relações econômicas no contexto cultural, em vez de uma explicação usando só classes sociais

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Ryan Thomas Adams 1112 N. College Avenue #210 Indianapolis, IN 46202 [email protected] Professional Preparation 2010 2004 1994

Ph.D. in Anthropology (Minor: Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change) - Indiana University M.A. in Anthropology - Indiana University B.S. in Public Affairs, School of Public and Environmental Affairs (Concentration in Environmental Science) - Indiana University

Academic Employment 2010Assistant Professor – Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Lycoming College 2008-2010 Lecturer – Anthropology Department and University College, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis 2007-2008 Future Faculty Teaching Fellow – Anthropology Department, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis 2007-2004 Assistant Instructor – Anthropology Department, Indiana University 2001-2004 Research Assistant - Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change (CIPEC), Indiana University Publications Adams, Ryan T. (2010) “A Review of „The World of Soy‟. Food and Foodways, 18: 1, 114-117. Adams, Ryan T. (2010). “From the 2009 Meeting - Rural Elites” Anthropology News. March, 2010, Section News: Culture and Agriculture, p.42. Adams, Ryan T. (2008). "Large-Scale Mechanized Soybean Farmers in Amazônia: New Ways of Experiencing Land." Culture and Agriculture, Vol. 30 (1), Pp. 32–37. Scouvart, Marie, Ryan Adams, M. Caldas, V. Dale, B. Mertens, V. Nédélec, P. Pacheco, B. Rihoux, E.F. Lambin. (2007). “Causes of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: a Qualitative Comparative Analysis.” Journal of Land Use Science, Vol. 4 (2), Pp. 257–282. Moran, Emilio, Ryan Adams, Bryn Bakoyéma, Stefano Fiorini, and Bruce Boucek. (2006). “Human Strategies for Coping with El Niño Related Drought in Amazônia.” Climatic Change Vol. 77 (3-4), Pp. 343–361. Select Awards and Fellowships Best New Theme (2009) – Award for a Themed Learning Community at IUPUI. “Life‟s Not Fair: Understanding Social Inequality” Future Faculty Teaching Fellow (2007 – 2008) – Teaching Fellowship through IUPUI/IU Outstanding Instructor Award (2005) – Anthropology Department, Indiana University IIE Fulbright Grant (2005) – Dissertation Research in Santarém, Pará State, Brazil David Skomp Fellowship (2003) – Travel award for summer fieldwork Academic Service Appointments Secretary/Treasurer (2007-2010), Student Representative (2006-2007), Culture and Agriculture, American Anthropological Association. Nominations Committee Chair (2004-2005), National Association of Student Anthropologists, American Anthropological Association.