Abstract
This chapter points to gaps in knowledge within the literature on rural social movements and ecological transitions in the Brazilian Amazon. I focus on social movements affiliated with La Via Campesina (LVC), the world’s largest international peasants’ organization. LVC’s leaders have adopted ‘agroecology’ and ‘food sovereignty’ as common political principles. Previous research explored the extent to which these orientations have led to local ecological transitions in Brazil’s south; here, I argue that it is necessary to ask similar questions of Amazonian activist spaces, which have been the focus of a small amount of academic literature in spite of important regional specificities. I suggest a three-fold research programme in order to address this gap. I also present a methodological discussion on the importance of ethnographic research.
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Notes
- 1.
See for example https://www.coveringclimatenow.org. All websites were accessed in March 2020.
- 2.
Current rates of deforestation in the Amazon are said to be at their highest rate in a decade, with a whopping 9762 km2 of forest lost between August 2018 and July 2019, according to Brazilian space agency (INPE) data quoted in The Guardian on 19 November 2019 (Watts 2019).
- 3.
Some estimates claim that Amazonian biomass stores between 90 and 140 billion tons of carbon, the equivalent of over a century of human CO2 emissions at early 2000s rates (Soares-Filho et al. 2006).
- 4.
For a detailed description of the events that led to the deadly shooting of 19 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, or Landless Movement [MST]) activists by military police in Eldorado dos Carajás, in southeastern Pará, on 17 April 1996, see Branford and Rocha (2002: 138–142), see also Simmons (2005).
- 5.
A review (Wezel et al. 2009) is widely cited for the three-fold definition of agroecology as a science, a set of practices and a social movement. Others argue that trying to define it chronologically from its first appearances in scientific literature in the first half of the twentieth century is politically reductive (Altieri and Nicholls 2012; Giraldo and Rosset 2017). It ignores that many so-called agroecological practices, while they can be enhanced through scientific and social scientific research in partnership with farmers themselves, are similar to traditional Indigenous and peasant practices that were well adapted to specific locales, and that farming techniques in themselves are not transformative of other problematic aspects of the current food system such as credit structures, social and cultural domination of certain groups by others and land access and market access (Mendéz et al. 2015). This characterises the posture of academics who are part of a more ‘political’ wing of academic agroecology and discursively support social movements’ agroecological initiatives, as opposed to a more ‘technical’ wing which defines agroecology in ecological terms without taking a clear political stance (see Bellamy and Ioris 2017; Lamine 2017; Levidow et al. 2014 for analyses of this rift). For many authors and activists, agroecology is necessarily political because agroecosystems are the site of power relations and shaped by public decisions and institutions (Molina 2012).
- 6.
See, for example, the call to support agroecological food production by UN special rapporteur on the right to food (De Schutter 2010); see also growing support of the FAO, in the form on online declarations, centralisation of know-hows and opening of institutional space and funding for research into agroecology (FAO 2018).
- 7.
This policy strategy had access to two cycles of funding (2013–2015 and 2016–2019), including an operationalising plan (Brasil Agroecológico, or Plano Nacional de Agroecologia e Produção Orgânica (National Plan for Agroecology and Organic Production [PLANAPO]) from 2016 on, but is currently unfunded and has lost any political momentum within the federal government since Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in late 2016.
- 8.
For example, assumptions explored by the works I cite include the notions that all people who live in areas affiliated with rural social movements organisations (SMOs) consider themselves active members; that all members of food sovereignty SMOs fully understand, agree with and act on their movements’ programme; that because SMOs struggle against historical oppression, they always enhance local and participatory democracy; that democratic and ecological choices are always compatible; or that because movements campaign for agroecological transitions in food systems, their actual local effects always enhance sustainability transitions.
- 9.
Scaling ‘up’ refers to institutionalising agroecology in state structures and market processes, while scaling ‘out’ means enlisting more farmers and territories in agroecological production (Altieri and Nicholls 2012; Cacho et al. 2018; Dalgaard et al. 2003; Rosset and Martinez-Torres 2012; Varghese and Hansen-Kuhn 2013).
- 10.
- 11.
This is where the MST has been active for the longest and formed its organisational methods and ethical conception of land justice (Wolford 2010), which permeate large sectors of La Via Campesina (LVC) Brazil since the MST has helped consolidate strategies and train many cadres of other LVC movements in Brazil.
- 12.
Within Issberner and Léna’s edited volume, some contributions (e.g. May et al. 2017) address the intersection of socio-ecological transformation and land right movements in the Amazon, but approach the topic from a geographical and policy analysis perspective—this is highly relevant and useful, but does not help analyse the social effects of movements on local cultures, everyday lives and locally specific conceptions of agroecology.
- 13.
In addition, the Rural Youth Pastoral (PJR) is present in Pará, Mato Grosso and Tocantins. The Movement of Artesanal Fisherfolk (MPP) and the National Coordination of Quilombola Communities (CONAQ) have more prominence in the Northeast and relatively little presence in the Amazon, where CONAQ is present in Maranhão, Pará and Tocantins and MPP in Pará.
- 14.
Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining (Movimento pela Soberania Popular na Mineração [MAM]) is not a member of La Via Campesina Brazil at this time.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
As Gurr (2017: 93) reminds us, in great resonance with my own experiences and observations, the notion of MST membership is a subject of scholarly debate as the MST does not officially keep a register of its members and conceptions of movement belonging and identity change fluidly in time and space (Issa 2014), with residence in an MST-affiliated space (Sigaud 2015), with evolving movement discourse (Vergara-Camus 2013) and according to local and regional dynamics of mobilisation responding to structural factors (Wolford 2010).
- 19.
See Costa (2017) for a Masters’ dissertation by a Brazilian researcher conducting this type of research in an agrarian reform settlement in Rondônia, which shows that the construction of relations with urban consumers, within and outside of public policies designed to support school attendance, proper school-aged child nutrition and smallholder income such as the Food Acquisition Programme (Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos, PAA) and the National School Food Programme (Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar, PNAE) is a crucial factor in how successful agroecological projects can become on settlements located close to urban centres.
- 20.
Desmarais (2007), already emphasises the aspect in the first broad work on LVC, although not drawing on immersive research.
- 21.
It is interesting to note that the MMC was partly born out of the will of young women who separated from the early MST in Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina states in the 1980s to form their own movement, one of their concerns being that MST leaders wouldn’t listen to women and respect them as political subjects (Rubin and Sokoloff-Rubin 2013). A social history and sociology of the MMC in the Amazon remains to be written.
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Lagier, C. (2021). La Via Campesina’s Agroecological Militancy at a Crossroads: New Research Avenues for Amazonian Studies. In: Ioris, A.A.R. (eds) Environment and Development . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55416-3_17
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