Carbon Colonialism in the Amazon?

Abstract

Regional trends of global significance involving frontier peasants in deforestation
along the expanding frontier of the Amazon are seen through the eyes of those who produce them. During their lives thousands of frontier peasants from western Maranhão became gold prospectors in western Pará and then frontier peasants again in the region of Itaituba. Going beyond simplistic environmental rhetoric blaming slash-and-burn agriculture for global problems with carbon emissions, local perceptions of life paths and rural livelihoods are presented to show how settlers escaped from desperate poverty in their place of origin only to end up living in the degrading conditions of gold prospecting and finally arrived at their current situation as struggling but independent frontier farmers in western Pará. As this relative improvement in livelihood comes at a cost of deforestation caused by the unsustainable nature of frontier farming, the spatial mobility of frontier peasants risks recreating the social problems of the North-east in the North. Consequently, it is argued here that proposals for reducing environmental degradation and poverty in the Amazon should not be limited to merely promoting sustainable farming systems in the Amazon but also must include addressing issues of underdevelopment in the North-east in order to overcome the problems which compel so many peasants to emigrate from that  region.