Forest extractivists face succession challenges

Researcher at the 66th meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science emphasizes the importance of providing ways for the current generation of young people living in the conservation units to remain in the forest

By Elton Alisson, in Rio Branco (AC)

Agência FAPESP – Extractivist reserves are playing an important role in the protection of forest resources in the Brazilian Amazon. They currently cover an expanse of 24 million hectares, an area equivalent to 5% of the biome’s territory.

Some of the main challenges for project continuity, however, will be to provide social and economic conditions that enable the current generation of young people living in these conservation areas to remain in the forest and assume the leadership role performed by their parents and grandparents in past decades.

The assessment was made by Mary Allegretti, a professor at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), in a lecture about the 25 years since the creation of the forest reserves given during the 66th Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC). Entitled “Science and Technology in an Amazon without Borders,” the event was held July 22-27, 2014 on the campus of the Federal University of Acre (UFAC), in Rio Branco.

“The 1989 establishment of the forest reserves in Amazônia constituted a revolution because had they not been instituted, the rubber tappers, today referred to as extractivists, would have left the forest and gone to the outskirts of the cities, and the forest’s natural resources would have become raw materials rather than a way of life,” Allegretti explained.

“Today, having 5% of the Amazon Rainforest protected by traditional communities that live in 89 conservation units is a historical milestone that is the result of the collective effort over recent decades by unarmed rural illiterate laborers, with no political or economic power, who decided to fight hard against destruction of the forest,” she said.

These rural laborers, who came mainly from Brazil’s Northeast in two large migratory flows, arrived in Amazônia to work in the extraction of latex from the forest’s plantations to produce rubber.

The initial flow occurred during the first Amazon rubber cycle between 1880 and 1920, in what was called the “rubber boom.” During this period, which saw the mass extermination of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Rainforest, rubber tappers in the biome set themselves up in shacks and lived within a system of debt servitude. “This cycle ended when Malaysia entered the international rubber market and Amazônia exited it,” Alegretti said.

The second migratory flow of rubber tappers in the Amazon occurred during World War II (1939-1945) when, because rubber production in Asia was blocked, there was again demand for the Amazon product, and the rubber tappers started to be called “rubber soldiers.” This cycle ended soon after the war in 1946 with the emergence of the rubber crisis in the global rubber market.

According to Allegretti, it was during that period that a process of disaggregation began to influence the shack communities, allowing the rubber tappers to live with a certain autonomy as a sort of forest peasant.

“The rubber tappers continued to live in the forest on a subsistence basis, with no main product like rubber but also without needing to depend on an employer. That was when the process of building a society in the Amazon Rainforest began to take shape,” she said.

The process was interrupted by the establishment of Brazil’s military regime in 1964. The military’s belief was that the Amazon represented a type of demographic vacuum that needed to be filled by a series of infrastructure investments that would stimulate colonization of the region.

“One of the consequences of the process of expansion into the forest was the emergence of a series of clashes with the rubber tappers who were already living there and who began to be expelled by ranchers arriving in the region,” Allegretti explained.

“At that time, rural worker unions appeared in the municipalities of Brasileia and Xapuri, in the state of Acre, and they began to defend the notion that the rubber tappers who were already living in the forests were squatters and thus had rights to the lands on which they lived,” she said.

Chico Mendes

According to Allegretti, the first big clash between the ranchers and the rubber tappers took place in 1976, when Wilson de Souza Pinheiro (1933-1980), original leader of the union movement, defended the idea that the rubber tappers should remain in the forest and defend the places they lived through so-called “standoffs” against deforestation.

The researcher said that one of Pinheiro’s supporters was Chico Mendes (1944-1988), who was born in Xapuri, Acre, the son of northeasterners and rubber tappers. Unlike most of the rubber tappers, Mendes was literate and assumed leadership of the movement after Pinheiro’s murder in 1980.

“One of the main strategies implemented by Chico Mendes along with the standoffs to strengthen the movement, which had weakened with the murder of Pinheiro, was to establish and increase the number of public schools, cooperatives and clinics in the forest,” explained Allegretti, who had lived with the environmentalist during her research studies.

Because of his ideas and protests against paving the BR-264 highway, Mendes gained national and international prominence. His December 22, 1988 murder had huge international repercussions, culminating with the 1990 signing of a decree that established Brazil’s first four forest reserves, according to the researcher.

“There had to have been the murder of Chico Mendes and several other leaders in order for the Amazon forest reserves to come into existence by force of law,” she said.

According to Allegretti, one of the achievements obtained through the forest reserves over the past 25 years has been the reduction of agrarian conflicts between the extractivists living on the reserves and ranchers in the Amazon Forest.

The reason for this reduction is that the federal government took on the role of mediator in these conflicts because it is responsible for ensuring the safety and wellbeing of the communities that live in these reserves. “However, the federal government is having a problem seeing and assimilating the extractivists as protagonists in managing the forest reserves,” Allegretti said.