Environmentally Appropriate, Sustainable Small-farm Strategies for Amazonia

Abstract

Many of the efforts to establish food or commodity crop production in Amazonia have, at best, been short-lived successes. For example, the infamous ‘Zona Bragantina’, a roughly 30,000-square kilometre area of eastern Pará settled in the early part of this century by small farmers. The Belém-Bragança Railway (opened 1908 and closed in 1936) permitted the settlement of the Zona Bragantina, where settlers used to conditions in the more arid North-East or the South of Brazil cleared the forest and tried to farm; most ended up practising shifting cultivation and then had to abandon the degraded land. Today much of the Zone is still covered in secondary regrowth scrub (capoeira) and yields less than it did before the settlers cleared it. Efforts by big business to establish large-scale commodity crop production have also fared badly. The Fordlândia and Belterra rubber plantations, established along the Rio Tapajós in the late 1920s, did not produce for long. Labour difficulties, pests and crop disease meant that they could not compete economically with South-East Asian plantations. Few of the large cattle ranches which have spread in the last few decades can be said to be sustaining high levels of grazing on their largely unimproved pastures. Ambitious attempts by an American multi-millionaire, Daniel Ludwig, and his successors, to establish paper pulp production using plantations of fast growing exotic trees, and large-scale, intensive rice production on a 1.4 million hectare landholding along the Rio Jarí are surrounded in intrigue and debate about profitability. A few years ago, Ludwig sold the enterprise to a consortium of companies, having reputedly spent over US$ 1,000 million trying to establish production.

In our impatience with ‘backward’ small farmers and in our haste … rapidly [to] ‘commercialise’ them, we have overlooked key aspects of their farming systems that could enhance our efforts to increase food production and improve rural well-being (Harwood, 1979, p. xiii).