Beyond carbon colonialism: Frontier peasant livelihoods,spatial mobility and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

Regional trends of global significance involving frontier peasants in deforestation are seen through the eyes of those who produce them in remote places of the Amazon, where during their lives thousands of settlers from the underdeveloped North-east of Brazil have moved from frontier farming to gold prospecting and back again. 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 scrutinized to show how settlers escaped from desperate poverty in their place of origin but wound up living in degrading conditions of gold prospecting and finally arrived at their current situation as struggling but independent frontier farmers in western Pará state. As this relative improvement in livelihood comes at a cost of deforestation due to the unsustainable nature of frontier farming and risks recreating the social problems of the North-east in the North, it is argued that proposed solutions to reduce environmental degradation and poverty in the Amazon will also have to address issues of underdevelopment in the North-east in order to overcome the problems which compel so many peasants to emigrate from that region.