Socio-ecological change at deforestation fronts

Extractive and agrarian frontiers are characteristically resource-rich regions of low demographic density, often located at some distance from the respective political centres, and undergoing profound environmental, economic, political and cultural transformation processes. Frontier regions are often represented as “empty”, “unproductive” lands, waiting to be “developed” and put to use. Governments encourage their colonisation, and attract new actors, ranging from transnational corporations to landless peasant colonists. Massive infrastructural developments facilitate the extraction of natural resources (e.g. timber, fossil fuels, minerals and ore) and the access to land for large-scale agricultural production (e.g. soybean, meat, oil palm). This brings rapid deforestation and the destruction of fragile ecosystems. Landscapes and biodiversity become marketable values in international commodity chains, that far from guarantee sustainable and fair practices.

My focus is on peasant farmers and indigenous communities, their livelihoods and land use systems. State policies have for decades fostered either the intensification of traditional, slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture (e.g. using Green Revolution techniques), its specialisation or abandonment: a trend exacerbated by the economic liberalisation, and the financialisation of the agricultural sector.

By analysing changing patterns of land use in peasant farmer and indigenous communities, it is possible to explore how indigenous communities are incorporating new lifestyles, forms of organisation, knowledge and cultural meanings, blending these with their own, or neglecting local ways in the process. Local perceptions of, and relationship with, Nature are changing as peasant and indigenous populations incorporate new value systems and role models. Individual needs and aspirations change: a trend best observed among young people, who often project themselves into a future outside the countryside and in non-agricultural employment.

How will life on the land change in future? Drawings from pupils and students, Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico

Key challenges are to understand:

• to which extent rural communities may develop their own adaptation paths
• how external actors may support, or at least not hinder, local endogenous trajectories of change, and
• whether these local pathways can be sustainable and equitable over the long term.