Between conservation and commodities: Does Peruvian tropical forest conservation challenge or reinforce extractivism?

Abstract

Despite Peru's adherence to economic and environmental policy guidance from multilateral institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and United Nations agencies, deforestation in the Amazon region has remained stubbornly high. While recent scholarship has shown prevailing conservation policy programs in the Peruvian Amazon to be largely ineffective, there is little analysis of why Peru's conservation and development program has failed to address the underlying drivers of deforestation. In this article, we ask whether Peru's prevailing conservation policy has meaningfully challenged the extractivism and cash crop expansion that ultimately drive deforestation. To answer this question, we analyze recent political ecology scholarship alongside interviews we have conducted over the past decade with Amazonian community members, environmental nonprofit staff, conservation workers, and state functionaries. Our analysis shows that Peru's conservation policy has relied on three major pillars: (1) establishing protected areas alongside decentralization reforms, (2) implementing payments for ecosystem services schemes, and (3) expanding ‘green’ commodity production through a range of state programs. We analyze how each of these have been implemented in practice, showing how they have each accommodated and reinforced, rather than challenged, the expansion of extractive industries. In this way, Peru's approach to conservation and development in the Amazon can be understood as part of an emerging ‘commodities consensus,’ wherein conservation and extractivism mutually support and legitimize one another. We conclude by contrasting conservation under the ‘commodities consensus’ with more radical visions of conservation rooted in agroecology and expansive land rights, suggesting that political ecologists and social movements work to analyze and challenge conservation under the commodities consensus.