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The cultural politics of the agroecological transition

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Abstract

Scholarly attention to sustainability transitions is rapidly increasing. This article explores how cultural politics constrain agricultural change. Cultural politics, or conflicting values about appropriate types of agriculture, are an underexplored variable influencing whether or not farmers adopt agroecological methods. The research focuses on the environmental, cognitive, and relational mechanisms that influence cultural politics. It analyzes the intersection of mechanisms and cultural politics in an Amazonian agrarian reform settlement of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). Insights into the factors confounding the agroecological transition are derived from an analysis of longitudinal spatial data derived from historic aerial photographs and remotely sensed images, and ethnographic data from participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Drawing on a political ecology of education perspective, the cultural politics surrounding the agroecological transition are traced to the confluence of the region’s historical usage for cattle ranching (environmental mechanisms), farmer’s conceptions of space (cognitive mechanisms) and the combination of agricultural extension and government credit (relational mechanisms). The MST’s agroecological education initiatives hold the promise to drive the sustainability transition, but are also constrained by these cultural politics and associated mechanisms.

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Notes

  1. Unquestionably, there are significant debates about what constitutes sustainable agriculture, and what does not (Vandermeer 1995; Hansen 1996; Rigby and Cáceres 2001; Lee 2005). This article recognizes the importance of these debates, which include questions about whether organic is inherently more sustainable than conventional agriculture, in addition to what are the salient characteristics of sustainable agricultural systems. For the purposes of this article, agroecology is considered a form of agriculture that is more sustainable than high-input conventional agriculture. In this article, the concept of sustainable agriculture subsumes practices including reducing off-farm inputs (pesticides, mechanical inputs), and agroecological approaches, such as intercropping and polyculture, integrated pest management, and cover cropping (see Wezel et al. 2009 for a review of agroecology as movement, science and practice).

  2. Two main approaches to this are sustainable intensification (Pretty et al. 2011), and ecological intensification (Doré et al. 2011); see Tittonell (2014) for a comparative review.

  3. See Wolford (2004) for a description of the canonical account of the MST’s origination, and an ethnographic account of why landless farmers joined the movement in Brazil’s Northeast and South.

  4. These structural approaches include political opportunity and resource mobilization theory; for more on these lenses, see McCarthy and Zald (1977, 2001) and Tarrow (1998).

  5. The MST advocated this form of cooperativism based upon visits to Cuba, and the guidance of Brazilian sociologist Clodomir de Morais, who drew upon Kautsky, in arguing for the rationalization of production (See Diniz and Gilbert 2013 for details on de Morais’s role). These visits were before Cuba’s famous agroecological transformation.

  6. The reasons behind the general failure of many of the MST’s cooperatives are complex. The cooperatives lacked the ability to compete with subsidized industries that dominated the market. They also didn’t have access to credit, and couldn’t develop the capital to invest in improving their production. Wolford (2010) explores cultural conflicts facing the cooperatives. For example, she details how the cooperatives did not gel with traditional camponês practices, as they resulted in the gendered division of labor, didn’t involve producing for subsistence, and were at odds with spatialized histories of labor.

  7. The MST’s turn to agroecology is part of a larger emergence within Brazil of alternative forms of rural development; for a larger discussion see Borges (2007, 2010) and Barcellos (2009).

  8. Carta do 5° Congresso Nacional do MST. See http://www.cartamaior.com.br.

  9. The prevalence of fraudulent land titles, weakness of land tenure regimes, and general historical inequity of land distribution in the Amazon are major factors influencing the ongoing conflict over land in southern Pará. For extensive discussion of these factors see Simmons (2004, 2005), Simmons et al. (2007), and Aldrich et al. (2012).

  10. INCRA is the state agency responsible for creating agrarian reform settlements.

  11. Many place the total at 21, but the bodies of two individuals were not accounted for at the morgue, and have never been recovered. For an analysis of the event in the context of larger regional land violence see Simmons (2005).

  12. The abundance of natural resources, such as rubber and Brazil nuts, fomented rapid settlement. However, due to inequitable patterns of land ownership in the Amazon, land is in reality not abundant, but actually scarce because powerful groups hold the land, frequently relying upon fraudulent land titles.

  13. The history of cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon can be traced to the initial period of European conquest, when cattle were produced for meat, and for the export leather market (Furtado 1971). At present, cattle production in the Amazon runs the gamut from industrial full-cycle production (calf to adult slaughter), and industrial fattening operations, to serving as a major component of smallholder rural livelihoods.

  14. The Superintendent of Amazonian Development, or SUDAM, provided major incentives for industrial-scale cattle ranching. SUDAM invested US 1 billion dollars (1982 dollars) by 1983 in promoting these large ranches—whose average size was nearly 24,000 ha, occupying together more than 8 million hectares (Binswanger 1991 in Bowman et al. 2012, p. 559).

  15. Federal Institute of Pará -Rural Campus of Marabá or IFPA-CRMB. The IFPA-CRMB is a high-school in a different MST settlement, which offers a vocational degree program in agroecological extension.

  16. All individuals’ names are pseudonyms.

  17. Other factors influencing the return to sugarcane include the rise of cane prices in the early 2000 s, and the settlement residents’ increasingly ambivalent feelings towards the MST (Wolford 2010).

  18. Importantly, while the overall trend can be described as conversion of forest cover to cattle pasture, and the maintenance of already existing pasture, there have definitely been areas of forest growth. This can be seen particularly in the topmost left (and to some extent, also, the right) quadrant of the settlement. This forest regeneration is largely taking place alongside the edge of streams. To what extent this forest growth is intentionally anthropogenic, or is the result of succession, is unclear, but tracks the larger trend of forest recovery in Latin America (Hecht 2012).

  19. Approximately equal to USD $3,250.

  20. Historically, extension contracts were for up to 4 years.

Abbreviations

IFPA-CRMB:

Federal Institute of Pará-Rural Campus of Marabá

INCRA:

National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária)

MST:

Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra)

PEoE:

Political ecology of education

PRONAF:

National Program of Strengthening of Family Farming (Programa Nacional de Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar)

SUDAM:

Superintendent of Amazonian Development (Superintendência do Desenvolvimento da Amazônia)

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Acknowledgments

This research would not have been possible without financial support from the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, BCS#1060888), Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship), and the Fulbright Foundation. The author gratefully acknowledges the feedback of three anonymous reviewers and Dr. Harvey James, as well as Rafter Ferguson who provided integral suggestions early on in the framing of the literature.

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Meek, D. The cultural politics of the agroecological transition. Agric Hum Values 33, 275–290 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9605-z

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