I am reposting below (with permission) an email that was sent by Brenda Baletti, a Geographer and PhD candidate at UNC, Chapel Hill, to the listserve of the CLAG (Conference of Latin American Geographers). She addresses some very important and interesting issues that cross with some of my work and the work of many of my colleagues, responding to Thomas Friedman's op-ed piece in the New York Times on 11 November. Comments are welcome, of course.
Heather
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Hi all,
I realize that I am probably preaching to the converted, but I am mid-fieldwork in exactly the region from where Friedman wrote an op-ed piece yesterday about the possibilities for Amazonian conservation and I feel the need to respond:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/In his November 11th op-ed piece, Thomas Friedman argues that while it is too complex and would take too long to change the developed world’s petroleum consumption, a fast and easy solution to our carbon woes is to completely rework economic development in the Brazilian Amazon by investing a large amount of foreign capital into the region. This attitude—that it is too difficult to change our forms of consumption, but we’ll pay them to change theirs—is exactly the brand of paternalist/imperialist logic that has informed development practices in much of the world since World War II and has created many of the problems that Friedman is allegedly seeking to address.
Friedman’s argument is based on the assumption that environmental protection can most effectively be realized through market mechanisms. I agree that the current forms of capitalist development will soon destroy what we think of as “the Amazon”, although I would remind Friedman that the Amazon is more than the “lungs of the world.” His “unending sea of broccoli” is a human landscape. The social consequences of multiple forms of “green” development are devastating the region’s inhabitants. We see this socio-environmental destruction daily in the area that Dr. Friedman is currently visiting with the bauxite mines of ALCOA, Electronorte’s plan to construct five hydroelectric dams in the Tapajós River watershed (among hundreds of others in the Brazilian Amazon), the construction of a Cargill’s massive soy exportation facility on the Amazon River in Santarém, and territorial reordering projects that remap the region in the name of conservation and sustainability but in the service of development, which is proving more each day to be a severe contradiction. Increasingly the conservation areas and the territories of the region’s inhabitants are cut to a fraction of their intended size in order to accommodate the demands of loggers, mineral companies, large farmers, and dam builders. And still, barges of timber leave the “protected areas” at alarming rates. Management plans approved by the state and federal governments allow both legal (although often unethical) and illegal extraction, while the very regulating agencies created to monitor the extraction process look the other way.
Current market-based incentives, advocated for by most international NGOS such as Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy, green-wash this kind of development. All of the corporations listed above are packaging their projects as green development projects, but they are not without the same old development consequences. For example, programs such the “soy moratorium”, which create incentives for soy farmers to farm without deforesting, result in dispossession of small farmers and expansion of monoculture agriculture. The dams that are financed as “green energy” by the very climate legislation to which Dr. Friedman is referring will submerge hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest and displace and dispossess tens of thousands of people. This are just a couple of examples of Dr. Friedman’s market-based solutions.
Friedman’s implication that reducing the number of hectares that smallholder agriculturists have under cultivation by giving them access to international markets for artesenal goods borders on the absurd. First, there is no such large or even medium scale production of such goods in the Tapajós; Dr. Friedman visited one of the few communities in the national forest that produces such goods, and the producers in these communities are only a handful of families (rather than being a small industry that supports 8,000 people as he suggested). Second, this market-based solution raises a direct threat to food sovereignty in the region—who would produce the food that these farmers stop growing in order to have time to make rubber purses? Would it be the industrial farmers that are moving into the region replacing diversified agro-ecologies with monocultures? Should these communities really predicate their livelihoods on the tastes and lifestyle choices of wealthy tourists from North America and Europe?
Friedman argues that 46% of the Amazon is “set aside” for indigenous people and conservation. I’m doing research in two such areas in the region where Friedman is visiting and argue that this characterization is flawed. On the same day that Conservation International and Dr. Friedman were chatting with families in the Tapajós National Forest, 65 km to the west on the other side of the Tapajós River, the indigenous and traditional residents of Gleba Nova Olinda were reacting to the forces of development in a very different manner. People from over 40 communities joined together in theirrabetas (canoes with outboard motors), closed off the Arapiuns River to timber exportation and sequestered two barges full of timber in a dramatic effort to garner attention and support for their struggle to access territorial rights for indigenous communities and to eliminate logging in the region. When state and federal government agencies recognized the violation of these rights but steadfastly refused to act to correct the situations, the people took environmental enforcement into their own hands, burning the two barges of wood. This dramatic act demonstrated that they would rather destroy the wood than to let their patrimony leave the area in the hands of loggers.
Four months earlier and 100 km to the east, the Brazilian government created the Renascer Extractive Reserve, a conservation area, at half of the original size promised to its inhabitants in order to provide access to primary forests for loggers and to mineral deposits for miners. Since the creation of the reserve on June 5th, illegal logging activity has increased exponentially. Up to 5000 cubic meters of wood is leaving the reserve PER DAY. Despite countless denunciations through legal channels by residents and their social mediators, the regulating government agencies do nothing as the timber goes down the river to the open market. At this rate, according to a local logger, the wood in the reserve will be gone within just a few months.
In both of these cases the territories of "traditional" people are being severely limited in order to grant territorial rights to loggers developing “sustainable management plans” to take all viable wood out of these areas. These are only two examples of countless situations where the smallholder residents of the Amazon region are robbed of their rights and their patrimony in the name of a sustainable development model that caters to multiple stakeholder interests.
The severe problems of the post-Kyoto debates, the current global economic crisis, and the general collapse of the free market paradigm all indicate that the market-based governance approach that Friedman and most major international environmental NGOs advocate are nearly always insufficient and incorrect. Further, the social and environmental costs of green-washing these market based approaches to conservation are enormous. If countries and organization of the global north truly want to stop destruction of the forests and peoples of tropical regions, the myriad non-market based approaches to conservation must be recognized, valorized, and implemented in these debates about climate change legislation. Many of the people of these regions have a much better knowledge of how to manage these areas then G-20 bureaucrats. The international community can better serve Amazonian conservation by directly engaging in domestic debates rather than using the generalized discourse of “governance” and market based solutions to problems of global consumption patterns. A more reasonable approach is to put pressure on state and national governments to recognize and respect the rights of people to govern themselves and their region in practice rather than just in rhetoric. A more thoughtful paradigm also begins by recognizing that our modes of consumption and of international governance are directly responsible for much of the destruction with which we are all so concerned.
Santarém, Pará, Brasil
November 12, 2009
Brenda Baletti
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Geography
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Very good post Heather, I read it with that sickening feeling one gets when you know that whatever is being said is being directed straight at you.
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