After the Frontier: Problems with Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian Amazon

Author(s): David Cleary

Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 1993), pp. 331-349
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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 After the Frontier: Problems with

Political Economy in the Modern

Brazilian Amazon

DAVID CLEARY

The theoretical interpretation of social and economic change in the

Brazilian Amazon has been dominated by a political economy in which the

notion of the frontier, variously defined, has been central. Brazil is of

course not the only country where a fuzzily defined idea of frontier

development has been important, and we can think, as Turner did for the

United States, of a Brazilian frontier thesis. It can be boiled down to a

simple contention, although the arguments are often complicated: the

frontier, now restricted to Amazonia, is the absorption of peripheral

regions by an expanding capitalism. This perspective, fundamental to

numerous studies of Amazonia, sees a tendency towards homogeneity in

economic structure and social relations in the cycle of frontier

development, with capitalism ending up as the dominant force. It regards

the key subjects in the dynamic of the frontier as the peasantry, who are

acted upon by the bourgeoisie and the state, and argues that the dynamic

of events within the frontier is determined outside it, in the forms of

capital accumulation in the national economy and the way regional

economies are articulated to it. Although first formulated in the I970s, it

remains overwhelmingly the most influential theoretical approach to

explaining Amazonia's modern history, irrespective, one is sometimes

tempted to think, of the direction that history has actually taken.

My purpose in writing this article is threefold. The first is to summarise

and critique the political economy of the frontier as it has been applied to

the Brazilian Amazon. Much - though not all - of this body of work is in

Portuguese, and the debates and findings within it have not therefore

reached as wide an audience beyond Brazil as they deserve. The second is

to examine recent Amazonian history in the light of the predictions made

by frontier theory. I argue that the defining characteristics of modern

Amazonia - the central role now played by the informal economy, the

simultaneous decomposing and recomposition of the state, the complexity

David Cleary is Research Officer at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University

of Cambridge.

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 25, 331-349 Copyright ? 1993 Cambridge University Press

33

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 33 2 David Cleary

of livelihood composition, the synergic inter-relationships between

economic sectors, rapid urbanisation paradoxically combined with a

blurring of the distinction between the urban and the rural - all mean that

the traditional concepts and vocabulary of political economy are of limited

use in explaining and interpreting the region. This has been reflected in

the fact that theories of frontier development derived from orthodox

political economy have proved an unreliable guide to economic, social and

political trends in the Brazilian Amazon. Finally, I attempt to draw some

conclusions, defining the limits of a revised political economy of

Amazonia and suggesting ways future research can analyse and interpret

what most of the modern Brazilian Amazon has become: the post-

frontier.

The political economy of the frontier

As a body of academic work the political economy of the Brazilian frontier

falls into two stages, which can be thought of as the classical and

revisionist periods. The first begins with the anthropologist Otavio

Velho, who in 1966 started fieldwork among the peasants and caboclos of

the Araguaia-Tocantins in eastern Amazonia.1 The result was Frentes de

Expansao e Estrutura Agrdria (Rio de Janeiro, 1972), a largely empirical

monograph dealing with regional economic and social history, and

examining the consequences for the local population of the building of the

Transamaz6nica highway. It remains a basic text in the economic

anthropology of Amazonia, and with the passing of time has acquired a

further patina of interest as a valuable record of the Araguaia-Tocantins

just before it was utterly transformed by highway construction, gold

rushes and large development projects. Velho subsequently expanded the

theoretical basis of his conceptualisation of the frontier in Capitalismo

Azutoritario e Campesinato (Sao Paulo, 1976), incorporating it into a general

theory of capitalist development in Brazil and its implications for the

peasantry, and in a collection of essays, Sociedade e Agricultura (Rio de

Janeiro, 1982). The other major contributor to the political economy of

the frontier in Portuguese during the 1970S was the sociologist Jose de

Souza Martins, in a short but influential essay 'Frente pioneira:

contribuicao para uma caracterizacao sociologica'.2 The classical period of

frontier theory then culminated in Joe Foweraker's The Strugglefor Land:

A Political Economy of the Pioneer Frontier in Brazilfrom 19o to the Present

Day (Cambridge, I98I), which combined an empirical study of frontier

1 Caboclo is the term used for the indigenous peasantries of the Brazilian Amazon: see

below in this article.

2 See de Souza Martins, J., Capitalismo e Tradicionalismo: Estudos sobre as Contradifoes da

Sociedade Agrdria no Brasil (Sao Paulo, I975), pp. 43-50.

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 The Political Economy of the Brazilian Amazon 33 3

development in three areas (southern Para, southern Mato Grosso and

western Parana) with an elaborate theoretical framework.3 It remains the

best-known and most widely quoted model of frontier development in

Brazil, and is still acknowledged as the theoretical basis of research on

Amazonia being published almost a decade later.4

Although there are differences of emphasis between Velho, Martins and

Foweraker, they have much in common. Each defines the frontier

differently, but the differences are more a function of the level of detail in

their accounts than theoretical disagreement. For Velho an 'expansion

front' is a demographic notion, describing a movement of peasants into

geographically remote areas, ultimately determined by 'authoritarian

capitalism' and its modernisation of Brazilian agriculture. Martins defines

the frontier in economic terms, as a zone of transition from a subsistence

to a market economy, where the key element is the growth of private

ownership of land.5 But it is Foweraker who best summarises the classical

political economy of the frontier when he asserts, 'it is possible to

generalise about the pioneer frontier by means of a political economy

which locates it in the context of the national economy and society and

explains the expansion at the level of accumulation'.6 He views the

frontier as the integration of 'unexplored regions' into the national

economy, and suggests this takes place in three stages. In the first 'non-

capitalist' stage, geographically isolated local economies revolve mainly

around subsistence, complemented by some petty commodity production,

usually extractivist in nature. This is succeeded by a 'pre-capitalist' stage,

marked by more intensive in-migration, an increase in extractivism and an

emerging land market: petty commodity production persists, but

embryonic capitalist labour relations appear. The final 'capitalist' stage

sees intensive migratory flows into the region, an increasingly capitalised

agriculture displacing extractivism, and the concentration of land

ownership. Petty commodity production may persist, but it is sub-

ordinated to capitalism as the region is 'integrated' into the national

economy.7 This theoretical framework leads to empirical predictions:

increased migration to frontier areas, the dominance of capitalist

3 For a more extended discussion of the work of Velho, Martins and Foweraker,

together with a consideration of their relationship to Turner's theories of frontier

development in the United States, see Alberto Carlos Louren~o Pereira, Garimpo e

fronteira amaoAnica: as transformafoes dos anos 80, unpubl. master's thesis, CEDEPLAR

- UFMG [Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional da Universidade

Federal de Minas Gerais], Belo Horizonte I990, pp. I-64.

4 See, for example, J. Lisansky, Migrants to Amazonia: Spontaneous Colonization in the

Brazilian Frontier (Boulder, 1990), and R. Wesche and T. Bruneau, Integration and Change

in Brazil's Middle Amazon (Ottawa, I990).

5 Martins, Capitalismo e Tradicionalismo, pp. 45-7.

6 Foweraker, The Strugglefor Land, p. 5. 7 Ibid., pp. 27-57.

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 334 David Cleary

agriculture in the countryside, the decline of extractivism, the expansion

of capitalist social relations, the subordination of petty commodity

production, concentration in land ownership - the erosion of autarchy in

the Amazonian economy, in other words.

As the I98os unfolded, it became clear that these predictions were

mistaken. Within Amazonia, it was increasingly obvious that the trend

was towards greater heterogeneity in both economic structure and social

relations, rather than a convergence towards capitalism. Such capitalist

enterprises as did establish themselves in the Amazon during the I970S

and I98os usually formed isolated enclaves, grafted onto local economies

with which they usually had little contact, with capital, plant and many

workers coming from outside the region. They were located in Amazonia

either for tax purposes or, as in Serra dos Carajas or the Manaus freeport,

as the result of policy decisions by the state to which the existence of such

vital elements in frontier theory as the growth of a market in land was

entirely irrelevant. As a result, recent years have seen the appearance of a

revisionist trend in the research literature in both Portuguese and English.

A seminal figure in the development of this revision of frontier theory was

Donald Sawyer, a sociologist who spent the g980s at the Centre of

Development and Regional Planning (CEDEPLAR) in Belo Horizonte,

Minas Gerais. In a number of publications he pointed out that Amazonia

presented capitalism with a range of intractable problems, most

importantly high transport costs, the absence of personal and economic

services for a middle class or an agricultural 'bourgeoisie', and

environmental constraints.8 It was therefore to be expected that capitalism

on the frontier would often retreat rather than expand. During the

I980s, CEDEPLAR became the most important centre of a new political

economy which documented and analysed the unanticipated complexities

of Amazonian development. Younger Brazilian scholars from the Centre

pointed to the importance of social actors and processes which had been

ignored by classical frontier theorists, such as informal sector mining9 and

high rates of urbanisation.l? A parallel literature in English emphasised

the persistence and often the expansion of petty commodity production,

the growth of the informal economy, and the multiplicity of actors,

conflicts and outcomes on the frontier.11

8 The most widely available summary of Sawyer's thinking in English is 'Frontier

Expansion and Retraction in Brazil', in Marianne Schmink and Charles Wood (eds.),

Frontier Expansion in Amazonia (Gainesville, 1984), pp. I80-203.

9 See Pereira, Garimpo e Fronteira Amazonica.

10 See C. A. Torres, 'MigraSao e o migrante de origem urbana na Amaz6nia', in P. Lena

and A. de Oliveira, Amazonia: A Fronteira Agricola Vinte Anos Depois (Belem, 199I),

pp. 291-302.

11 See, for example, D. Cleary, Anatomy of the Amazon Gold Rush (London, i990) and

M. Schmink and C. Wood, Contested Frontiers in Amayonia (New York, 1992).

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 The Political Economy of the Brazilian Amazon 3 5

Looking back, the classical political economy of the frontier now seems

very much embedded in its historical context, in more ways than one. It

was elaborated as an authoritarian military government was breaking

down the geographical and economic isolation of Amazonia, using all the

policy tools at its disposal to foster what was loudly proclaimed as

modernising capitalist development. With the benefit of hindsight, and

after more than a decade of economic vicissitudes and retrenchment on the

part of the state, it is now clear that what at the time seemed the

unstoppable onward march of capitalism was in fact an artificial spasm

only made possible by enormous and ultimately unsustainable state

subsidy. Equally, the assumption that the frontier tends towards

expansion, fuelled by a constant supply of 'new lands' to which the

dispossessed are displaced and the enterprising attracted, looked

increasingly outdated as major highway construction ground to a halt and

feeder roads filled out existing highway corridors. The difference between

the frontier experience of Brazil and the United States now appears to be

that in the US the West was won, while the Brazilian frontier has collapsed

before reaching much of the North.

The central place the peasantry occupied in classical frontier theory,

together with the confidence with which the term was used, further

distances the modern reader from it. Campesinato in frontier theory is

essentially a political term, without ethnographic content, although Velho

would later admit the importance of distinguishing between incoming

peasant migrants and indigenous caboclos.'2 Even so, peasants and

peasantry are inherently problematic terms in the Brazilian Amazon. It is

difficult to generalise about Amazonian caboclos. They tend to be quite

mobile, with migration facilitated by kinship ties which give residential

rights to affines; they hunt, fish and practise extractivism as well as

agriculture; they spend periods in towns and cities; they engage in wage

labour as well as in aviamento debt-credit relationships, and move

seamlessly between monetised and non- or partly monetised spheres of the

regional economy.13 On the coast of Para and Maranhao the basis of

caboclo economy is fishing, in Acre it is rubbertapping, in Roraima it is

even ranching.14 Incoming migrants classed as peasants included such

12 0. Velho, 'Campesinatos e Politica', Anudrio antropologico 77 (Rio de Janeiro, 1978), pp.

277-300.

13 The fullest description of caboclo kinship and economy in English is D. de M. Lima

Ayres, 'The Social Category Caboclo: History, Social Organisation, Identity and

Outsider's Social Classification of the Rural Population of an Amazonian Region

(Middle Solim6es)', unpubl. PhD diss., Univ. of Cambridge, i992, chs. 4-7. See also

Charles Wagley's classic monograph Amazon Town: A Study of Man in the Tropics (New

York, 195 3), chs. 2-4. Aviamento is the general term used to describe the great variety

of economic systems in Amazonia which revolve around debt-credit relationships.

14 For monographs of caboclo fishing villages, see V. R. Loureiro, Os Parceiros do Mar:

NatureZa e Conflito Social na Pesca da AmaZonia (Belem, i985) and L. G. Furtado,

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 3 3 6 David Cleary

diverse groups as Northeasterners and gaichos, who generally had very

different levels of resources, agricultural backgrounds and experience of

markets. This complexity would be an argument for not using the terms

'peasant' or 'peasantry' in Amazonia, save for the fact that campones and

campesinato are used as terms of self-description by significant numbers of

Amazonians. But they should be used in a critically aware, historically

informed manner, which incorporates the knowledge that in Amazonia

one can talk of peasantries but not a peasantry. Economic change was

never likely to act homogenously on the diverse mass of Amazonian social

groups frontier theorists conflated into a 'peasantry': it will be argued in

greater detail below that one of the recurring problems in the application

of political economy to Amazonia has been the careless use of broad

analytical categories like class and peasantry in a region which is too

ethnographically complicated for them.

It is more than a little ironic that the sequence of events predicted in the

early formulations of the political economy of the frontier did indeed take

place in several parts of Amazonia, but in regions of long established

settlement rather than at the frontier. A number of studies by

anthropologists and sociologists have documented the recent decline of

various forms of non-capitalist production in northeastern Para, which

includes some of the first areas to be colonised by Europeans, such as the

island of Maraj6 and the immediate hinterland of Belem. The growth of

Belem resulted in the expulsion of independent smallholders from Maraj6

as landholders expanded beef production to meet increased local

demand, a process which also saw wage labour replacing a variety of

economic arrangements linking latifundidrios and tenants.15 Similarly, once

Belem's large urban market had been opened up to imports from the rest

of the country, the competition from cheap, industrially produced rum

from other parts of Brazil killed off a large artisanal industry of sugar-cane

cultivation and distilling in the hinterland of Belem, where trade and

labour relations were based on a form of aviamento, with the mill-owners

preferring to take advantage of new economic opportunities in the city,

and the cane cultivators and distillery workers being forced to enter the

Curralistas e Redeiros de Marudda: Pescadores do Litoral do Para (Belem, 1982); for Acre and

rubbertapping see K. Bakx, 'Peasant Formation and Capitalist Development: The Case

of Acre', unpubl. PhD diss., Univ. of Liverpool, 1986; for ranching in Roraima see

P. Riviere, The Forgotten Frontier: Ranchers and Ranching in Northern Brazil (New York,

1972).

15 V. Loureiro, Miseria da Ascensao Social: Capitalismo e Pequena Produfao na Amazonia (Sao

Paulo, 1987).

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 The Political Economy of the Brazilian Amazon 337

urban labour market on much less advantageous terms.16 The ethno-

graphies of fishing on the coast of northern Para describe a process of

subordination of petty commodity production to an expanding capitalism

very much along the lines predicted in frontier theory, but again in

communities founded in the eighteenth century.17 The one published

study of urbanisation in Belem also suggests that the recent expansion of

the city is best understood as a consequence of the proletarianisation of

peasantries in its hinterland.18

This evidence of the direction of economic change is clearest for Belem

and northeastern Para, where the most important institutes of social

research in the Brazilian Amazon are located and social scientists are

thickest on the ground, many of whom choose to work locally. It is

unfortunate, if understandable, that other large urban centres, most

importantly Santarem and Manaus, have not received similar research

attention. Yet there is a certain logic to the idea that capitalism would find

the most propitious circumstances for its expansion not on the frontier at

all, but in the larger Amazonian cities. Once easier physical access to these

urban markets was established, they were sufficiently large to attract the

interest of external investors and manufacturers. Their entry, and the

diversification of the local economy which resulted from it, encouraged

local elites to move out of long-established activities into the urban

economy, where many more opportunities for investors were now

available. The result, in the long term, was that non-capitalist forms of

economic organisation like aviamento lost ground to wage labour in and

around the large cities. Meanwhile, in what was being defined as the

frontier, something very different was happening.

The economy of AmaZonia

In political economy's common characterisation of regional economies as

a form of Chinese box, articulated to a wider national economy which is

in turn articulated to a global economic system, the specificity of the local

and the regional is often lost. It is difficult to get much sense of the social

world or of economic life from the classical political economy of the

frontier, which knew what it meant by a peasantry, modes of production,

and all its other objects of analysis and conceptual tools, and did not often

feel the need to provide an ethnographic referent for them.19 It is striking

16 S. D. Anderson, 'Engenhos na Varzea: Uma Analise do Declinio de um Sistema de

Producao Tradicional na Amaz6nia', in Lena and de Oliveira (eds.), A Fronteira

Agricola Vinte Anos Depois, pp. 101-24.

17 Loureiro, Os Parceiros do Mar, and Furtado, Pescadores do Litoral do Para.

18 T. A. Mitschein, H. R. Miranda and M. C. Paraense, Urbanizaf?o Selvagem e Pro-

letariafcao Passiva na Amazo6nia: 0 Caso de Belem (Belem, I989).

19 Otivio Velho's work is a partial exception to this generalisation.

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 338 David Cleary

in The Struggle for Land, for example, how the peasantry is both

omnipresent and absent, continually talked about but never actually

appearing, subsumed into an ideological framework in which what a

peasantry is, and the range of possibilities open to it, had already been

decided. In discussions of capital accumulation in the Brazilian economy,

and how Amazonia is articulated to it, one loses any sense of the

Amazonian economy as a sphere of human agency, let alone social

organisation. It becomes a sub-system of a sub-system of a system. What

defines it, the diversity and regional variation underlying social structure

in Amazonia, disappears. Hence the absence in classical frontier theory of

much of what turned out to be important as the frontier evolved: the

informal economy, towns and cities, and a multi-layered, emphatically

non-monolithic state.

A reconstructed political economy of Amazonia should begin within

the region and work outwards. This is not an empiricist argument: the

object of the exercise is to make valid generalisations about economic

structure in Amazonia, and find ordering concepts. In the composite

image of the Amazonian economy which emerges from economic history,

official statistics and non-statistics, and the results of fieldwork across a

number of disciplines, some interesting commonalities cut across the

underestimated variation between sub-regions of the Brazilian Amazon.

Perhaps the most striking is how extraordinarily mobile its population is.

Most attention has been devoted to what it is easiest to get migration

data on, however imperfect: inter-regional migration to Amazonia from

Northeastern and southern Brazil. The picture here is of rapidly declining

levels, from a peak in the mid-g80os, with urban-urban migration

becoming more important than urban-rural.20 But more important, and

statistically almost invisible, is internal migration within the region.

Recent work on such diverse groups as caboclos, agricultural migrants,

gold miners, inhabitants of cities and towns, and extractivists is all linked

by a common thread: people move around a great deal, often covering

huge distances.21 Strictly speaking, a great deal of this internal migration

20 D. Sawyer, 'Population Growth and Migration in the Amazon', An Analysis of

Environmental Problems in the Amazon, World Bank Report no. 91o4-BR, vol. 2, Annex

I, p. 2 (Washington I990: unpubl.). Inter-regional migration data are much easier to

obtain for western Amazonia, where there is only one important entry route, compared

to several for eastern Amazonia. Yet it seems certain eastern Amazonia has experienced

a similar decline, which probably began earlier.

21 For caboclo mobility see Ayres, 'The Social Category Caboclo', chs. 6 and 7; for the

movement patterns of agricultural migrants see Lisansky, Migrants to Amazonia, pp.

107-12 and 135-8; for movements made by a range of social groups linked to gold

mining see Cleary, Anatomy of the Amazon Gold Rush, pp. 73-96 and 2I 1-22; for urban

populations see Torres, 'Migra(ao e o migrante de origem urbana', and B. Godfrey,

'Boom Towns of the Amazon', The Geographical Review, vol. 80, no. 2 (I990), pp.

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 The Political Economy of the Brazilian Amazon 339

can be seen as a form of transhumance, based on work which is (or can

be made) both temporary and recurring, with people moving regularly

between points where different economic opportunities are available.

There are a number of generalisations which can be made about internal

migration in Amazonia. Firstly, its ubiquity and economic importance is

inversely related to its visibility in the imperfect statistics of population

movement in the region, and it has been fieldwork-based research which

has demonstrated its importance, not official figures. Secondly, it is clearly

related to the rise of the informal sector during the I980s, in both urban

and rural areas, most importantly mining and trading in the interior, and

construction, domestic service and retailing in towns and cities. It could

also be argued that marked human mobility, together with the complexity

of Amazonian livelihoods, has been a feature of Amazonia's economic and

social history: in many ways the development of the modern Amazonian

economy has taken place along historically established lines, contrary to

the received image of the region. Thirdly, men are a lot more mobile than

women, less constrained by childcare and able to move more freely in an

economy in which many more economic activities are open to them than

to women. This clearly has important implications for kinship, household

structure and gender in Amazonia, which are as yet almost completely

unexplored by researchers. Finally, as much population movement is

between city and countryside, or vice versa, a blurring of the distinction

between the urban and the rural, which was already characteristic of

Amazonia, has been reinforced.

Although some of this mobility is involuntary, the inevitable

consequence of a lost land conflict or the lumpenproletarianisation of a

peasantry, a great deal of it is not, and should be seen as part of an active

process of livelihood construction, rather than a desperate survival

strategy. One thinks of Ayres' description of the migration of caboclos in

the middle Solim6es to Manaus and interior towns like Tefe, which may

or may not be permanent and is not linked to land conflicts, the decades-

long use of Itaituba as a base for periodic work in the gold camps of the

Tapajos valley, the symbiotic relationship between gold mining and

agriculture in the Gurupi in western Maranhao, or the long-distance

trading so characteristic of the coasts of Para and Maranhao and the

103-17; for movement of extractivists between urban and rural areas, see

S. Schwartzman, 'Land Distribution and the Social Costs of Frontier Development in

Brazil: Social and Historical Context of Extractive Reserves', in D. Nepstad and

S. Schwartzman (eds.), Non-Timber Products from Tropical Forests: Evaluation of a

Conservation and Development Strategy, Advances in Economic Botany no. 9 (New York,

1992), pp. 51-66.

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 34o David Cleary

regatoes of the major river systems.22 The most important exception is the

mobility of smallholders in highway corridors. The withdrawal of

ranching and other investment subsidies has meant the breaking-up or

abandoning of many large estates - or at least those which were not

phantom operations all along - with consequent deconcentration of land

ownership in many areas. However, the most important beneficiaries have

usually been relatively capitalised medium-sized ranchers and farmers,

who have been able to take advantage of constantly rising land prices to

make tempting offers to smallholders, for whom selling up and moving on

with a lump sum becomes an attractive option.23 Now that the supply of

'new land' has been reduced to a trickle, their next destination is more

likely to be an urban periphery. Even where smaller farmers do occupy an

abandoned large estate, the degraded pasture they usually inherit will

force further moves within a short time.

Linked to a highly mobile population is another striking feature of the

modern Amazonian economy: the complexity of livelihoods, especially

male livelihoods. Again, this has been a feature of Amazonia's economic

history compared to other regions of Brazil: all the memoirs of travellers

and natural scientists in Amazonia since the nineteenth century at some

point remark on the large number of small traders in the interior.24 The

range of activities which make up caboclo livelihoods has already been

noted, and there are many parallels among less historically established

social groups in Amazonia. Urbanisation and the expansion of the

informal economy have provided many more opportunities for rural

households to earn off-farm income, while those already in towns and

cities use them as a jumping-off point for work in rural hinterlands, as well

as in the urban economy. In urban areas the most important components

of livelihoods in terms of the numbers of people involved are state jobs

and pensions, the service sector, especially retailing, and construction

work; in hinterlands the most important is informal sector mining, which

directly employs somewhere between a quarter and a half million people,

agriculture, ranching and extractivism.

22 A regatao is a river trader. Trading in Amazonia is another important area which has

not received the attention it deserves. See D. McGrath, 'The Paraense Traders: Small-

Scale, Long-distance Trade in the Brazilian Amazon', unpubl. PhD diss., Univ. of

Wisconsin-Madison, 1989. There is as yet not even a thesis on regatoes in the middle

or upper Amazon.

23 See G. Martine, 'Rond6nia and the Fate of Small Producers', in D. Goodman and

A. Hall (eds.), The Future of AmaZonia: Destruction or Sustainable Development (London,

I990), pp. 23-48, for a detailed analysis of this process in western Amazonia; also

Lisansky, Migrants to Amazonia, for a more ethnographic community-level study of the

same process in Mato Grosso.

24 See A. R. Wallace, Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (London, I890), pp. 260-4, for

a memorable description of small trading and aviamento, for example.

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 The Political Economy of the Brazilian Amazon 34I

The complexity of Amazonian livelihoods is immediately apparent in

field research, and there is no shortage of hard evidence for it.

Schwartzman found that fully a quarter of the urban households he

surveyed in Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre, still gained more

than half their income from the rural zone, which included contributions

from rubbertapping, Brazil nut gathering, seasonal agricultural work and

selling the products of family farms.25 Macmillan found similar diversity

in both urban and rural areas of Roraima, at all levels of the social

hierarchy, and his description of 'ranching' livelihoods is both revealing

and representative:

A high percentage of ranchers have alternative sources of income (notably

government jobs) and many have investments in other sectors of the economy,

particularly in retail, mining, and construction enterprises. In fact, for many

ranchers the fazenda is simply a mechanism that permits the banking of resources

from their other business interests. Just as small farmers transfer their labour [to

informal sector mining] when agriculture is in decline, ranchers tend to transfer

capital to different sectors of the economy as investment opportunities arise.26

One finds such complexity in all sub-regions of Amazonia, in both urban

and rural areas, and among high and low income groups. In the parts of

western Maranhao and southern Para where I have done fieldwork, for

example, it was not difficult to find young men who in the course of a year

combined work in agriculture on a family plot with Brazil nut gathering,

informal sector mining and urban construction work, in the process

working under a form of aviamento, for wages, for a percentage stake, and

for themselves. In the Tucuma-Ourilandia area in southern Para, Sawyer

found an even more complicated economic mosaic involving a com-

bination of smallholding, informal sector mining, urban trading,

cultivating cash crops (mainly cacao), lumbering and ranching.27

It follows, therefore, that to understand how the economy of Amazonia

works, the relationships between its component parts - both economic

sectors and geographical regions - are more than usually important. The

link between informal sector mining and agriculture, for example, is

fundamental to the region's economy. Since in most sub-regions of

Amazonia mining is the most important source of off-farm income, and

since it is off-farm income which is critical in determining whether

smallholders continue in smallholding or extractivists continue to extract,

the economic implications of mining extend far beyond the mineral sector.

Ranching in Roraima, or Brazil nut gathering in southern Parai, or

25 Schwartzman, 'Land Distribution and Social Costs of Frontier Development', p. 6I.

26 G. Macmillan, 'Contemporary Land Use and Development in Roraima: A Brief

Overview', in P. Furley (ed.), The Forest Frontier: Settlement and Change in Brazilian

Roraima (London, I993 [in press]), p. 6.

27 Sawyer, 'Population Growth and Migration in the Brazilian Amazon', p. 5.

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 342 David Cleary

urbanisation in Rondonia, are not bounded topics: their internal dynamics

are only comprehensible in terms of their connections to other parts of the

regional economy. The importance of these linkages is often under-

estimated in research which takes a single industry or economic sector as

its object of analysis, just as studies of individual regions have to take

account of individuals moving between regions. Similarly, when you can

scratch a peasant and find a miner, a construction worker and an

extractivist, when a wage labourer, smallholder and percentage stake-

holder are all rolled into one, consistent relationships to means of

production dissolve, along with traditional notions of class structure and

collective identity.

Another safe generalisation about the modern Amazonian economy is

that the informal economy is considerably more important than the

formal, and will remain so. Mining is the most important informal sector

activity, in terms both of number of people involved and the value of

production. In I989 informal sector gold production, at around Ioo

metric tonnes, was worth more than twice as much as the iron ore

exported from Serra dos Carajas, which accounted for about 25 % of total

Brazilian iron ore export revenue of $2.2 3bn.28 Much economic activity in

urban areas - construction, trading, retailing and the service sector in

general - takes place within the informal sector, which, together with the

importance of gold production, means that most official statistics on the

Amazonian economy are almost useless.29 In recent years the cocaine

industry has made an appearance in the western Brazilian Amazon, and the

region's many remote airstrips, together with ports trading mainly with

Europe and Japan, suggest that it will become more deeply involved in

the international drugs trade as time goes on.

The informal economy is a large part of the answer to one of the most

perplexing questions of modern Amazonian development: what underpins

the region's extraordinarily high rates of urbanisation? The agricultural

economy of Amazonia is weak: the productivity of ranching is

proverbially low, especially after tax breaks are removed from the

equation, and even where capitalised farmers had access to good soils -

28 Ministerio das Minas e Energia, Anudrio Mineral (Brasilia I990). Figures on value of

exports from Economist Intelligence Unit, Brazil: Country Profile 19o90-9, p. 42.

29 The limitations of official statistics in the Brazilian Amazon are extreme, and often

understressed by researchers, especially economists. Agricultural and land tenure

statistics are complicated by credit regulations and financial incentives leading to

fraudulent reporting, the fact that many have no official title to their land, mixed

cropping, and the difficulty of quantifying subsistence production. There are very long

delays between the gathering and publication of data: at least five years in the case of

the quinquennial agricultural census. There are only approximate estimates available

for such critical activities as gold mining. An ethnography of official statistics would

be an important contribution to the Amazonian literature.

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 The Political Economy of the Brazilian Amazon 343

cacao in Rond6nia being a case in point - high transport costs make it

impossible for Amazonian produce to compete on the national market:

the dominance of Bahian cacao was never threatened by Rondonia. Some

smallholders and medium-sized farmers are profitable, especially near

regional urban markets in highway corridors, but their service require-

ments alone would account for only a fraction of the level of urbanisation

one finds in Amazonia. Public sector employment, highly centralised in

state capitals and large urban nuclei, plays a role, as does the timber

industry in some areas.30 But the most important single factor is

undoubtedly the informal economy. In a study of Boa Vista, the capital of

Roraima and centre of a mining boom in the i98os, Abers and Pereira

found that half of the over 400 households they surveyed depended on the

urban informal economy, working primarily in the ancillary sector of

equipment, transportation, fuel and entertainment, rather than directly in

mining.31 Even where urban nuclei are not linked to mining, their

economies are still largely informal, with the typical pattern being a mass

of unregistered microempresas. Sawyer correctly links this pattern of

economic development with the expansion of the highway and

communications networks and the multiplication of commerce which

followed it: the large number of microempresas, he suggests, stems from the

need for personal, face-to-face contact in an informal, non-institutionalised

credit market, where most lenders have relatively small amounts of capital

to play with and will cluster in towns and cities.32

Finally, we can generalise about the role of the state. In the classical

political economy of the frontier, the state was given a central role in

determining the expansion of capitalism on the frontier, understandably in

view of the vital part played by the state in transforming the Amazonian

economy during the two decades following the 1964 military coup. Later

writing on the state in Amazonia pointed to inconsistencies in bureaucratic

structure and its susceptibility to pressure through social mobilisation,

which, in the complexity of the frontier, afforded it a certain degree of

autonomy.33 Today, one of the many striking features of the way the

Amazonian economy has developed since 1970 is how the state was both

central and irrelevant. On the one hand, in constructing the highway

30 See J. Browder, 'Lumber Production and Economic Development in the Brazilian

Amazon: Regional Trends and a Case Study', Journal of World Forest Resource

Management, vol. 4 (I989), pp. I-I9.

31 R. Abers and A. Pereira, 'Gold, Geopolitics and Hyperurbanisation in the Brazilian

Amazon: The Case of Boa Vista, Roraima', in G. Fadda (ed.), La Urbe Latinoamericana

Ante el Nuevo Milendrio (Caracas, 1992).

32 D. Sawyer, 'Population Growth and Migration in the Brazilian Amazon', pp. 6-13.

33 For bureaucracy and the state in Amazonia, see S. Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon:

Extraction, Unequal Exchange and the Failure of the Modern State (Chicago, I 98 5), chs. 3-6;

also Schmink and Wood, Contested Frontiers in Amazonia, pp. I -20.

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 344 David Cleary

network and directly encouraging external investment in Amazonia, it

marked out the playing field for the region's future development. On the

other, the state proved to be so incapable of controlling the consequences

that it now has difficulty in putting a team on the pitch. Wherever one

looks in the Amazonian economy, the state is in retreat: unable to finance

tax breaks or build highways without the aid of multilateral banks, unable

to include more than one per cent of the rural population in official

colonisation schemes, unable to control land titling or land conflicts,

unable to register or tax the greater part of the Amazonian economy,

unable to enforce federal law on more than a sporadic basis.

Since approximately the mid-Ig80s, it has become clear that in

Amazonia the state is both decomposing and being reconstituted. There

has been a radical shift in power from the federal layer of the state on the

one hand to state and municipal government on the other. In part this is

a reflection of the fragmentation of party politics and the weakening of

central government which has characterised Brazilian politics since the

return to civilian rule in I985. It is also a reflection of the slow decay of

federal bureaucracy, as economic problems force a gradual slimming of

the federal payroll. It has been consecrated in the shift in the distribution

of tax revenues enshrined in the 1988 Constitution: in 1980 the disposition

of revenue between the federal level on one hand and state and municipal

governments on the other was almost equal, but after 1988 the federal

share declined to a third, where it is projected to stay.34 For Amazonian

states and municipalities this means the best of both worlds, since not only

do they get to keep a higher proportion of the taxes they collect, but they

also continue to benefit from net transfers of funds from federal

government which strongly favour the poorer regions of the country, and

Amazonia most of all.35 Municipalities benefit most, gaining five to eight

times more revenue than they actually collect. Meanwhile, the declining

authority of central government in general and the Presidency in

particular has given state-level political leaders greater leverage in

wringing further financial concessions from federal government in return

for political backing. A striking feature of recent attempts to control

government spending in Brazil, for example, is how little capacity the

federal government now has to control the activities of state banks, one

of the factors behind the failure to control liquidity despite the draconian

measures of the Collor Plan in I990.

In Brazil in general, municipalities and states have become much more

financially and politically independent of federal government. In

Amazonia in particular, where international pressure on the federal

34 A. Shah, The New Fiscal Federalism in Brazil, World Bank Discussion Paper no. 124

(Washington, I991), p. I7. 35 Ibid., p. 23 for detailed figures.

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 The Political Economy of the Brazilian Amazon 345

government has been intense, there is increasing divergence between the

political agendas of the different layers of government. In effect, political

and economic change in recent years has moved in parallel, interlinked

directions. The Amazonian economy has proved to be much more

autarchic, and much less capitalist, than frontier theory predicted. While

that was becoming clear, the balance of political power shifted away from

the centre in all of Brazil, but especially in Amazonia. The questions which

now remain to be answered, in this new economic and political conjuntura,

revolve around the very specificities which were ignored, or subsumed, in

classical frontier theory: who are the regional actors taking over the

apparatus of the state in different parts of Amazonia? How are new elites,

both economic and political, being formed? How are the historically

established elites, and the social groups below them, making the transition

to the new order? Which all boil down to the same underlying and

infinitely answerable question: what does the nature of the modern

Amazonian economy mean for social and political structure in the region?

Conclusion: political economy and the post-frontier

The political economy of the frontier has often assumed the penetration

of capital into remote areas to be synonymous with the penetration of

capitalism, an elision which has plagued the study of economic change in

Amazonia. It is a position best summarised by Jose de Souza Martins:

In fact, what characterises the penetration of capitalism is not the installation of

typical social relations of production formulated around the buying and selling

of labour power for money. What characterises it is the installation of private

ownership of land, that is to say, the interposition of capitalised income between

the producer and society.36

The fact that a regional economy can be called capitalist even in the

complete absence of capitalist social relations is symptomatic of a

recurring problem with the application of political economy to the

Brazilian Amazon. The broad analytical categories which characterise it

- peasantry, mode of production, class, state - become blurred when

applied to the region, conflating and radically simplifying a complex social

reality, as we have seen. The informal economy is not comfortable or well-

trodden ground for political economy, nor does the multi-dimensional

nature of Amazonian livelihoods fit very easily into its analytical

framework.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to conceive of a revised political

economy of the region. It would need to be grounded in a clear perception

of the nature of economic change in the modern Brazilian Amazon.

Capital penetration and capitalisation should not be confused with

36 Martins, Capitalismo e Tradicionalismo, pp. 49-50.

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 346 David Cleary

capitalism. Nor should monetisation, a point made by Weber in

criticising Simmel's 'The Philosophy of Money' as long ago as the first

decade of this century. It is perfectly possible for monetisation to

proceed apace without a corresponding expansion of capitalism, as the

history of Amazonia in the last decade shows. A revised political economy

would also need a newly sanitised analytical vocabulary. It is wrong to use

evolutionist terminology such as 'pre-capitalist' to describe Amazonian

economies or social formations:37 'non-capitalist' is the correct term.

Finally, although it is a truism to say that Amazonia is articulated to the

national Brazilian economy, the moral of the last decade is surely that the

Amazonian economy, for reasons to do with its distinct history, the size

of the region and its distance from the centres of economic and political

power in southern Brazil, is to a large extent autarchic. In economic terms

at least, then, it makes little sense to apply the vocabulary of core and

periphery to Amazonia. It is too complicated a case for dependency theory

or notions of internal colonialism to handle.

As for the frontier, however political economy defines it, it is still

disappearing. Major highway construction has stopped, and the peak of

inter-regional migration to Amazonia was several years ago. Many

stretches of what were once highways are now difficult to trace when

flying over where they run. The Perimetral Norte and the Transamaz6nica,

which were seen as the most strategically important highways in the

I970s, effectively no longer exist for much of their length: the state

predictably proved unequal to the Sisyphean task of maintaining them,

and gave up the struggle long ago. In northern and central Amazonia, the

frontier frequently arrived and then left again. The Transamazonica

reached the caboclo village of Jacareacanga on the Tapajos river in the early

1970s, for example. It was followed by land buyers and the growth of a

land market, just as frontier theory predicted. Then, in the I98os,

resources dried up, the road fell into disrepair, the land buyers moved out

and informal sector mining became the basis of the local economy. People

and goods now again move around by river or air, as they did before the

road arrived.38 For every exploding interior town in the highway

corridors of Rondonia or southern Para, there is a counterpart village in

central or northern Amazonia which dreamed of becoming a boom town

before the frontier ebbed, its high point traceable in decaying roads and

some sad human flotsam.

Where it did not recede, it was superseded. In the highway corridors of

eastern and western Amazonia we are clearly already dealing with a post-

37 As even Sawyer does, in 'Frontier Expansion and Retraction in Brazil'.

38 This summary of events in Jacareacanga is based on fieldwork carried out there in

November i990.

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 The Political Economy of the Brazilian Amazon 347

frontier society: urbanised, economically diversified, a population

stabilising as improved transport links no longer channel large numbers

of migrants from elsewhere in Brazil. As the frontier disappears, we can

expect its political economy to vanish with it. What replaces it will be

rather less ambitious in scope, rather less confident that it is possible to

draw sweeping conclusions from the patterns of social and economic

change in Amazonia. As we have seen, it is still possible to make useful

generalisations about the region. Equally, there are important general

questions which remain to be answered in future research, some of which

have been mentioned: the inter-relationships between internal migration,

household structure, kinship and gender; patterns of trade and trading

networks; elite formation; the changing composition of the state; the

linkages between economic sectors and between geographical regions; the

extent to which a small farm sector can establish itself; the relationship

between the formal and informal economies.

Beyond these essentially empirical questions are a number of more

theoretical issues as yet unexplored by researchers. For example, ideas of

risk and risk-taking link in a suggestive way into the diversity of

Amazonian livelihoods. Sawyer has suggested, in line with the established

perspective on risk avoidance as an economic strategy, that one motive

behind the construction of multifaceted livelihoods is to spread risk more

widely.39 This might not be the whole story. An alternative perspective

could be that Amazonians actually seek out risk, since in a highly

inflationary economy the ideal is not incremental gain but large, short-

term pay-offs. These are to be found primarily in high-risk occupations

like informal sector mining, the cocaine industry and speculative trading.

Paradoxically, risk avoidance becomes not so much a question of

minimising risk but of maximising it, since the more lottery tickets one

holds, so to speak, the likelier it is that one will provide a return. It may

well be the case that Amazonia provides more opportunities for this kind

of conscious risk-taking by all social groups compared to other parts of

Brazil, given the greater importance of the informal economy in the

region. This may be part of the explanation for the problems of both

subsistence and commercial agriculture in Amazonia, since they might be

seen as merely providing safe and steady returns in a context where the

cultural ideal is the gamble. As a failed Amazonian entrepreneur said in an

interview, 'I'm not angry about losing the money. I played and lost, but

at least I went to see what it was like'.40

Another unifying theme might be concepts of ownership, usufruct, and

property rights. There are parallels between caboclos, extractivism, informal

39 Sawyer, 'Population Growth and Migration in the Brazilian Amazon', p. 15.

40 Cleary, Anatomy of the Amazon Gold Rush, p. z28.

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 348 David Cleary

sector mining and agricultural migrants which suggest that there is a

distinctively Amazonian social construction of the relationship between

public and private property, which could be seen as an indigenous

philosophy of privatisation. It is based on a socially constructed perception

of abundant land (which is often not legally the case), the establishment

of ownership through usufruct, and an assertion of the right to free

movement - a link with the historical mobility of Amazonian populations,

it will be noted. Underlying the migration of colonists into Amazonia, and

reinforced by state propaganda from the I96os, was the belief that public

land was freely available and could be transformed into private holdings

through productive occupation. This had a legal foundation in the

concept of posse in Brazilian land law, but was also deeply rooted in

popular culture.41 The most striking example was in the quasi-millenarian

beliefs of the bandeiras verdes, a socio-religious movement linked to the cult

of Padre Cicero in Cearai, which encouraged Northeasterners to move to

the Amazon from the 1930S onwards in the belief that land was abundant

there. The caboclo communities in the middle Amazon studied by Ayres

and by Wagley similarly believe that usufruct confers ownership rights

over time when agriculture and/or extractivism is carried out on public

lands, or even on 'private' lands when the validity of title is not

recognised, whether or not caboclo land rights are formally ratified by

obtaining a title. Rubbertappers in eastern Acre operate a complex system

where households have usufruct rights over rubber trails located off large

rubber estates. Usufruct does not translate into ownership of trails by

individuals over time, but could serve as the basis for a successful claim

to communal ownership of rubber trails against the competing claims of

ranchers, culminating in the establishment of extractive reserves.42

Informal sector miners, while they assert the right of open access to gold

deposits 'to whoever wishes to enter', have a complicated system of

allocating work areas to individuals where ownership is only recognised

if that space is worked, and claims to areas which the claimant is not

working will be contested. Thus what was once public space, prior to the

discovery of gold, is transformed into a grid of privately owned spaces,

which can be bought and sold but in a market that is entirely within the

informal economy, with verbal agreements and socially recognised claims

taking the place of contracts and titles.43 All these examples show how

41 For a discussion of posse and an anthropological reading of Brazilian land law see

J. Holston, 'The Misrule of Law: Land and Usurpation in Brazil', Comparative Studies

in Society and History, vol. 33, no. 4 (Oct. 1991), pp. 695-725.

42 M. Allegretti, 'Extractive Reserves: An Alternative for Reconciling Development and

Environmental Conservation in Amazonia', in A. Anderson (ed.), Alternatives to

Deforestation: Steps Towards Sustainable Use of the Amazon Rain Forest (New York, 990),

pp. 2 5 2-62. 43 Cleary, Anatomy of the Amazon Gold Rush, pp. 59-72.

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 The Political Economy of the Brazilian Amazon 349

concepts of usufruct, property rights and the relationship between public

and private space in Amazonia vary between social groups, but not so

much that comparative analysis is incapable of revealing certain structural

similarities. The importance of usufruct as a means of establishing

ownership in Amazonia, and the way both miners and some extractivists

have succeeded in prosecuting usufruct-based claims to ownership against

fierce opposition from mining companies and ranchers, suggests that non-

capitalist notions of ownership are not only deeply entrenched in the

region, but can survive, and even reinforce themselves, in a monetised,

market economy.

In all of these questions, the notion of the frontier is progressively less

relevant. As an academic construct, and as the subject of political

economy, it seems part of a debate which has now run its course. The

modern Brazilian Amazon has become a complex, rather fragmentary

place, where historically established forms of social and economic

organisation transform themselves as well as disappear. If the frontier has

become meaningless as an academic construct, there is the consolation

that in the popular culture of Amazonia, and the imagination of

Amazonians, the idea of the frontier still leads a powerful and independent

existence, far removed - thankfully - from the quibbling of intellectuals.

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