Relaciones Interculturales

which fit within the larger framework of “participatory,” “pro-poor,” or “good”

governance, is that development is inevitable and therefore must be done “sustainably.”34

Further, nearly everyone, from developmentalists to development critics, argue that Brazil has sophisticated, progressive laws regarding both citizenship and the environment that are simply not enforced because the state lacks the capacity to do so (Benatti 1998; Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Holston 2008). Many of these “perfect laws,” however, were written into the Brazilian constitution as the result of compromises struck between

34 _{For examples of these governance models, see the FAO on food security}

ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/meeting/018/k6367e.pdf, or the World Bank (IRBD 1992). For Amazonian examples, see The Nature Conservancy, 2006, or Nepstad et al., 2006.

government and the social movements that took power during the transition to democracy, with the awareness that they were largely symbolic because their

implementation would be impossible within the existing government structure (Holston 2008). In other words, unenforceable laws were a state strategy to simultaneously appease both the left and the right. In the framework of governance, the logic that follows from the assertion of “good but unenforceable laws” is that there is a failure of the state that can only be solved through external assistance (e.g. private business and NGOs). In effect, the “failure of the state” becomes the primary justification for law enforcement through partnerships with non-governmental organizations and private parties.

This section contextualizes the emergence of Amazonian environmental governance with particular attention to ENGOs (also often referred to as “Big Conservation” (Borras and Franco 2010). I focus on how mandates to govern “environment and development” incorporated critiques of modernization-style

development into governance and introduced new structures of funding that contributed to the hegemony of ENGOs in regional governance and the ideology of “participatory sustainable development” in Amazonia. Finally, I argue that the hegemonic institution of “sustainable development,” along with the rise of a progressive government, set the stage for the governance paradigm that makes neo-extractivism possible.

From Developmentalism to Environmentalism

By the early 1980s, high rates of deforestation associated with the military government’s colonization projects (explored more fully in Chapter Three) garnered worldwide attention. From localized resistance by indigenous and traditional people to a

national environmentalist movement newly concerned with forest conservation, to international environmentalists and multilateral agencies, new networks of global environmental politics emerged in response to and as a critique of the military government’s developmentalism (Keck and Sikkink 1998).

Northern environmentalists—led by what would become the major international ENGOs (Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and Environmental Defense Fund, among others) —had come to see “tropical

deforestation” (a concept that did not even exist prior to the 1970s) associated with modernization-style development as emblematic of environmental problems caused by and located in the third world (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Those ENGOs were also faced with increasing opposition from the business community in northern countries and were seeking new, international markets (Corson 2010). Simultaneously, in the wake of decolonization, the new southern majority within the UN promoted a pro-development agenda for the global south. These positions came to a stand-off at the 1972 UN conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, where Brazil itself took a firm “pro-development” stance and the conference remained mired in an “environment versus development” debate (Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves 1989).

International environmentalist networks were simultaneously deepening and expanding and several global institutions were formed, funded largely by private donors and Scandinavian governments (the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the United Nations Environment Program worked in conjunction with the World Wildlife Fund) who developed a strategy linking environment and development. These alliances created a new, global, institutional, conservation framework marked by a series

of international conferences, papers, and programs implemented by the UN also in conjunction with international multilateral development agencies such as the World Bank, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the US USAID, and the ENGOS.35 _{Additionally, during the 1980s, membership and private funding for}

the ENGOs, many based in the US, also skyrocketed, and these organizations put international environmental issues visibly on the agenda of international political concerns (Adams 2001; Corson 2010).

The 1980s also marked the decade of democratic transition in Brazil, where social movements, including the environmental movement, were claiming new political space (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Keck and Sikkink 1998). Social movements in the Amazon, most famously the Rubber Tappers in Acre, were mobilizing against the

military regime and specifically around land conflict generated by developers moving on to traditional and indigenous lands. To garner worldwide support for their cause, they recast a struggle over land conflict to one for conservation. The assassination of rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes in 1989 set off a chain of events that initiated new

collaborations between the Brazilian state, national and international environmentalists, multilateral development institutions, foreign governments, and localized civil society organizations (Keck 1995; Hecht and Cockburn 2011).

This alliance will be explored in more detail in Chapters Four and Five. For our purposes here, it is important to note that it had substantive effects for both Amazonian                                                                                                                

35

Researchers locate the origins of the international environmental networks in the attempt to begin developing international institutions through the 1968 Biosphere Conference, the UN 1972 UN conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm (where NGOs received significant support through the funding of a parallel conference to avoid alienating their governments), the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), the 1988 Bruntland Report (Our Common Future), the 1992 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) conference in Rio, and the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) (Keck and

politics broadly, in that it made conservation a key issue in any future considerations of Amazonian policy, and for conservation approaches broadly, as it was one of several key episodes in a global political moment in which the export of the American “fortress conservation” model to the developing world was undergoing severe criticism.

International conservation activists and practitioners argued that conservation projects were not successful because they did not incorporate “local people.” These critiques resulted in a shift to a conservation approach that specifically integrated “local people” and their “economic development,” giving rise to the Integrated Conservation-

Development Projects (ICDPs), or Community-based Conservation, which became the leading conservation paradigm advocated by environmental NGOs and major donors by the mid 1990s (Adams 2001; Browder 2002).

This international/localized environmentalist alliance also drew significant attention to the devastation wrought by some of the national development projects financed by multi-national organizations such as the World Bank and USAID. In response, these organizations radically shifted their positions and therefore the terms on which they lent money—mandating environmental evaluations, accountability for money spent, and specific goals be met as terms for lending for development projects (Becker 1997). On a national scale, the federal government responded to harsh critiques from the international community and burgeoning national environmental movement by initiating new environmental actions, policies, and agencies, including the end of the

PoloAmazonia development program, the creation of CONAMA (the National

Environmental Commission), the National Program for the Environment (PNMA), and the Nossa Natureza Program. The government launched these initiatives with great

fanfare that included a comprehensive program geared toward the organization of environmental protection on a national level, environmental education, territorial

ordering, and the protection of indigenous and traditional people. Article 225 of the new constitution (1988) was completely dedicated to the issue of “the environment;” it specifically designated entire parts of the country (the Pantanal, the Mata Atlantica, and the Amazon) as areas of National Patrimony to be protected.

This was the context in which the concept of “sustainable development” emerged. Following several years after the publication of Our Common Future in 1987 and the establishment of the debt-for-nature swaps that first established the international ENGOs as key international environmental brokers, the “Earth Summit” or UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 marked the

institutionalization of the concept of “sustainable development” in the Brazilian Amazon through the launching of the Pilot Program for the Conservation of Brazilian Rainforests (1995-2009) (PPG7). The PPG7 was an international partnership between G7 countries, various Brazilian government environmental and social agencies, and international, regional, and local NGOs. Originally proposed by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the program provided US$250 million to meet its stated goals of reducing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and Atlantic Forests, conserving biodiversity, and demonstrating the feasibility of sustainable development and the possibility of north-south collaboration on environmental issues (Millikan et al. 2002).

Combining technical forest management with a larger project to restructure civil society through the creation of a professional network of environmental NGOs and through a territorial re-ordering based in ecological-economic zoning (see Chapter Three

for a more detailed discussion of this), the PPG7 effected a shift in civil society that Hochstetler and Keck (2005, 170) describe as moving from “adversarial (blocking)” to “collaborative (enabling) relations” with national and international policy makers. It responded to critiques of international multilateral institutions by local actors by requiring program participation from the sectors of society affected by the proposed projects. This meant that program financing targeted capacity-building in and by NGOs. Hundreds of new environmental or “socio-ecological” (sustainable development “from below”) NGOs were formed to capture some of the large sums of money flowing into the region for conservation projects, forming the Grupo de Trabalhosobre Amazonia (the Amazon Working Group), a consortium of over 600 NGOs and movement organizations.

At the same time that financing for state initiatives and state agencies was shrinking under the aggressive neoliberal policies in Brazil in the 1990s, multi-lateral loans increasingly carried environmental stipulations. This created a market for

environmental research and conservation projects with a large, external source of funding available through the PPG7, thereby shifting most conservation work to NGOs. The region saw the proliferation of “research NGOs” as producers of basic, scientific,

information (IPAM, environmental research institute IMAZON, the Socio-environmental Institute or ISA, Friends of the Earth or Amigos da Terra, among others) who work alongside the region’s traditional university-affiliated research organizations (The National Institute for Space Research or INPE, the National Institute for Amazonian Research or INPA, the Emílio Goeldi Pará Museum MPEG, the Institute for Applied Economic Research IPEA), but are generally funded through the multilateral institutions and other foreign donors (Leite 2005).

It also meant a professionalization of movements. To access the money available from PPG7 and similar programs, movement actors had to become formal organizations. The stipulations on funding to NGOs (who prior to the 1980s largely functioned as political organizers rather than implementers of development projects) mandated

technical protocols that forced organizational restructuring as government simultaneously began to contract out provisions of service to NGOs through partnerships (parcerias) (Buclet and Leroy 2002).36 _{They also had to implement projects with “outcomes” that}

could be measured as opposed to their more traditional practices such as political education, consciousness building, and organizing.

Territorially, this meant an explosion of “sustainable development” projects implemented through NGOs and state and federal agrarian reform agencies (The Pará state land institute, ITERPA, and the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform, INCRA), working with individuals or with communities to intensify their economic production—often requiring communities and individuals to take out loans to engage in these projects. The technical assistance, community investment, and localized knowledge of NGOs implementing projects was (and is) highly variable. The scope of these projects was striking; even in the most remote villages one encounters the legacy of one or another abandoned project. The subjective legacy is also clear—the project

participants (most of the rural Amazon) became adept in the language of sustainability that accompanied these projects, which almost always contained both a technical and                                                                                                                

36 _{NGOs, as part of “civil society,” are often depicted as representatives of “the people” based in their} emergence alongside social movements as mediators who defended and represented marginalized people. Many of these NGOs were associated with the Catholic Church and the liberation theology movement and dominated Amazonian social organizing for decades (Landim 1998). Technification and competition for funding, however, meant that NGO work was/is increasingly driven by market/state forces/desires. So while NGOs often discursively retained this position as representative organizations—e.g. stand in for “civil society”—they no longer necessarily enacted a practice of representative organizations (Buclet and

consciousness-building element.

Thus the conservation landscape in the 1990s generally favored both “community-based conservation projects,” which sought to make the traditional, indigenous, and peasant populations of the Amazon economically viable and conservation conscious, and the creation of protected areas (of various kinds, from “integral” to areas for “sustainable development,” in order to open other areas for

development). Economic viability strategies included accessing agrarian reform benefits, which focused largely on people considered to be traditional or peasant (and primarily organized as rural workers through the rural workers’ unions), as well as land

regularization and small loans for production projects (through the Constitutional Fund for the North or FNO and then the National Program for Family Agriculture or

PRONAF) oriented largely by NGOs. The primary institutions for the implementation of agrarian reform were INCRA, under the Agricultural Ministry or ITERPA on state lands or the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Natural Resources (IBAMA) and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) under the environmental ministry. These latter institutions enacted agrarian reform largely through the creation of “sustainable use” protected areas, which, along with Indigenous Lands (also considered key conservation sites), proliferated throughout the 1990s.

This principal strategy in the 80s and 90s of creating protected areas ultimately limited economic development because, whether in fortress conservation or its

community-based successor, it ultimately meant taking land out of the market.37 _As

Brazil’s economy recovered from crisis and resources became available for internal,                                                                                                                

37

That is not to imply that Units of Conservation are not also central to the process of accumulation. See Brockington and Duffy for a discussion (2008).

extractive-based development, keeping land out of the market “made less sense,” as the president of Pará’s land agency put it in an interview, and a new conservation-

development strategy became necessary. Neo-extractivism under the Workers Party

During the 1990s, the agro-industrial agricultural model that had intensified alongside and in opposition to the smallholder struggle for land in the 1980s,

consolidated “agri-business” into a political-economic block that included the agrarian, cattle-raising, industrial, mercantile, mineral, and timber sectors and their associated technological and ideological systems controlled by state partnerships with national and international financial interests (Fernandes 1999; Porto Gonçalves 2010a).38 _{In 2003, soy}

and sugar prices spiked and the federal government began to intensively-support rapid expansion of export-oriented industrial agricultural production (soy exportation alone grew 35% that year and agro-industrial expansion continued to grow at a rate of 22% per year). In a 2007 speech, Lula even went so far as to hail agribusiness leaders as Brazil’s “heroes” (Folha de São Paulo, March 20, 2007).

The Lula administration largely devoted development and funding priorities to agribusiness, especially for soy and sugar cane production and transport, over

smallholder agriculture. Agribusiness and smallholder agriculture are each served by a separate agency within the federal government (Ministerio da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento, MAPA for agribusiness and Ministério do DesenvolvimentoAgrário, MDA for smallholder agriculture). Agribusiness received 85% of the government-                                                                                                                

38

The strongest expression of which is in the Bancada Ruralista, the multi-partisan congressional group whose mission is to defend the interests of large rural landholders and typically controls approximately one quarter of congressional seats, making it the largest special interest group in Congress (INESC 2007).

extended rural credit despite the fact that subsistence agriculture supports over half of the Brazilian population, and his administration continued to support territorial policies that maintained the distribution of land as one of the most unequal in the world, with

agribusiness controlling 76% of arable land ( Mançano Fernandes 2012).39 _Other

mechanisms for supporting agribusiness expansion included embracing the agribusiness policies of the WTO and World Bank, continuing tax-exempt status for export-oriented agribusinesses, legalizing transgenic soy, granting financial credits for agribusiness projects, creating new territorial zoning projects to facilitate development, and planning a series of infrastructure projects nationwide to facilitate agro-industrial exports,

implementing “Agrarian Reform” largely in the Amazon where land “regularization” was prioritized over expropriation and re-distribution, and later, privatization over Agrarian Reform (Fearnside 2007a; Jepson, Brannstrom, and Filippi 2010; Mançano Fernandes 2012).

In the Amazon, the support for agribusiness expansion worked in conjunction with a host of other policies that supported other types of extractivism explored further in the following chapter. Similarly, the growth of agro-industry as a part of the national economy had implications for the Amazon both in terms of actual monocultural

production moving into the biome and through the infrastructure necessary for transport (the extensive impacts of infrastructure construction are treated in Chapter Three), as well as the displacement of other production systems (such as ranching) from soy producing areas in the south into the Amazon. As discussed in the introduction to this section and                                                                                                                

39

Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, one of the foremost scholars on Brazilian Agrarian Reform, defines “agribusinss” as bringing together industrial cattle and agricultural production, along with finance, market- based strategies, and technological innovation within one group of corporations.

explained in more detail below, national and international controversy over the effects of soy in the Amazon generated largely through a campaign launched by Greenpeace, paralyzed the process of this expansion. In response, this neo-extractive project was forced to address and incorporate environmental concerns. In other words, it needed to be “greened.” In the last decade series of “partnerships” between Brazilian and multi-

national corporations, and civil society organizations, mediated by Environmental NGOs, and often funded either by the multinational corporations or by foundations such as Ford and Moore have proliferated across the Amazon Region.40 _{In what follows, I analyze one}

such project to “green” soy agriculture in Amazonia. Through an empirical discussion of this project’s effects, I demonstrate how it compromises the livelihoods of the rural poor and the Amazonian environment.

SOY IN THE AMAZON: SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT or GREEN CAPITALISM?

Poor transportation infrastructure in the north and center-west is one of the major obstacles to expansion of Brazil’s agricultural commodity production in those regions. Paving the Santarém–Cuiaba highway (BR-163), built but not paved by the military government, could solve the problem of expensive transportation for exporters Bunge and Cargill, which purchase millions of tons of soybeans annually from the region, by

providing a direct route from MatoGrosso in the center-west to the Amazon River in                                                                                                                

40  _{There are innumerable examples of this phenomenon, including individual projects such as the TNC} project for Green Municipalities that is funded by Vale or the “Forum for the Sustainable Amazon,” the