Peasant Farming in the Amazon Frontiers

Abstract

The chapter examines the main tendencies and perspectives of peasant family farming (PFF) in agricultural frontiers such as the Amazon. The ontological features of PFF are discussed, in particular, the multiple associations with, and subsumption to, agribusiness. It expands the discussion initiated in previous chapters to further discuss how, due to national politico-economic pressures, the Amazon was reinvented half a century ago as a vibrant agricultural frontier that attracted vast contingent of migrants due to coordinated government plans and, in more recent years, the cultivation of export-oriented crops. One very intriguing feature of this dynamic geography is that small family farming represents the ‘other’ of capitalist agriculture, but it functions as a hesitant form of alterity that both resists and fulfils rapidly expanding agribusiness. Furthermore, the intricate Amazon experience of approximation and distancing from agribusiness parallels with what has been happening with peasants all over the world. Small farmers maintain an ‘inconvenient’ and resilient autonomy that is not at all easy to erode; they exhibit an internal logic (beyond romanticism) and flexibility that is difficult for the reductionist operations of capitalism to incorporate. This interplay between survival, resistance and opportunities are even more intense in areas like the ones in the Amazon, where agrarian questions and the ability of peasants to respond to challenges are directly related to the range of inequalities and alliances that result from the specific circumstances of frontier making.