SDGAcademyX: AMZN001 The Living Amazon: Science, Cultures and Sustainability in Practice

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4. Hi, I'm Susanna Hecht. I'm the Director of
5. the Brazil Center at UCLA and also a
6. Professor in the Luskin School of
7. Public Affairs. One of the problems that
8. occurs with Amazonian issues is that
9. there are real questions about the
10. development model that increasingly
11. moves into export-led development: highly
12. industrialized forms of development, such
13. as agroindustry, associated with soy and
14. corn, the questions of oil, mining, and so
15. on, and we'll talk further about what the
16. implications of these are. But, what's
17. important to understand is that the
18. economy shifts to an emphasis on
19. extractive products linked primarily to
20. international
21. markets for
22. soybean and beef, and these have enormous
23. implications for large-scale
24. deforestation. The other thing is that
25. these are importantly linked to
26. infrastructure expansion and the
27. speculation that goes with this. So, one
28. of the things that's important about
29. this is that as infrastructure expands,
30. particularly roads, so does deforestation,
31. and what is characteristic about this is
32. that a lot of those roads are informal
33. roads and that most deforestation —
34. something like 90% of it — occurs within
35. 10 kilometers of a road. So, the expansion
36. of roads for agroindustrial and other
37. kinds of activities is also a major
38. dynamic of
39. deforestation. And this has been sort of
40. a classic thing that one sees, which is
41. that when you start to put in roads, you
42. get a lot of deforestation that follows
43. it and a lot of trunk roads that come on.
44. One of the dominant land uses of these
45. cleared areas is for livestock, and it is
46. the main driver of deforestation. There's
47. a lot of discussion about this as being
48. primarily driven by markets, but it's
49. driven by a lot of other things. First of
50. all, it's mostly highly subsidized. Second
51. of all, it's got flexibility that
52. industrial agriculture doesn't. You don't
53. have to harvest on a particular date.
54. You can walk the animal somewhere else.
55. The other thing is it makes other forms
56. of land use kind of impossible.
57. Forest dwellers cannot use pasture —
58. cows use pasture. Second, and another
59. thing that's important is it's a great
60. way to cheaply speculate on land. The
61. costs of putting in cattle are expensive,
62. but it's nothing compared to putting in
63. agroindustrial things, and it's also a
64. means of showing what's called
65. "effective use." So, effective use means
66. that you actually end up having rights
67. to be able to claim these lands because
68. you've shown that it's not some useless
69. silly forest, but rather an important
70. livestock enterprise. Also there's the
71. whole symbolism and iconography of
72. livestock and livestock cultures as
73. being sort of masculinist, not those,
74. you know, icky forests, and also,
75. you know, it's that Marlboro Man kind of
76. thing. But it has a number of logics, both
77. for large and small holders, linked to
78. its ability to create assets of land to
79. claim land and its flexibility and
80. finally, it's low labor. So, if you think
81. about it, what we're beginning to see is
82. an Amazonia in which large scale
83. agriculture and large scale livestock, as
84. well as petroleum and other things, are
85. not absorbing labor, but they are
86. expanding exports. The expansion of
87. livestock has grown exponentially in
88. Amazonia. It's a simplified landscape, a
89. modernist landscape,
90. universalized and easily implemented.
91. It's deeply capitalized, but importantly,
92. it's exclusionary. So, if we start to look
93. at agribusiness, not through just the
94. commodity itself, but its structural
95. implications, we begin to see that this
96. is a really kind of problematic form
97. of development, and particularly
98. the
99. agroindustry, elements of it involve
100. essentially mechanized agriculture, which
101. absorbs very very little labor. It often
102. takes over areas that have been cattle,
103. and keeps pushing the cattle frontier
104. forward. If you want to take a look at
105. global demand for things like beef, what
106. you see is that there is a lot of
107. international demand. If you want to look
108. at where most of the clearing occurs, it
109. occurs now on public lands and
110. increasingly, through occupation of
111. Indigenous lands. So, in essence, what's
112. happening is that we are beginning to
113. see the expansion of a frontier that
114. pushes livestock forward at the same
115. time that it begins to expand
116. agriculture. What you can see is that
117. with the dominant export element here,
118. the dominant market is Asian, and you can
119. see also that it's rapidly expanding.
120. The agroindustry areas are increasing
121. inequality. They're the areas of
122. increasing
123. deforestation, and even as the value
124. of these things go up, what you see is
125. the share of small farm income
126. collapses from, let's say 1995 to
127. 2017, goes from 50% of the agricultural
128. income
129. to a mere 20%. So, tenurial regimes,
130. marketing, institutional issues, rents, and
131. capitalization and infrastructure for
132. large commodities are pushing large scale,
133. non-labor absorbing, export-led, mostly,
134. development, while urban development has
135. to absorb an increasing portion of
136. Amazonians, and that the rural areas in
137. terms of many kinds of activities become
138. no longer viable for small scale holders.
139. So, in this chapter we've kind of covered
140. a major shift in emphasis with an
141. expansion of inequality, this sort of
142. undermining of other options, labor-absorbing
143. options in industry and
144. manufacturing through the China shock,
145. but at the same time the expansion of
146. export markets, including to China. After
147. all China is the largest trading
148. partner with Amazonian countries, so we
149. begin to see a shift from a kind of
150. internal interest in development into a
151. very strong export-led model that of
152. course has been true throughout
153. Brazilian history and Amazonian history
154. since contact. What's also important to
155. realize is that we begin to see the rise
156. of non-labor absorbing petrol-hydrocarbon
157. development, non-labor absorbing cattle, but
158. which has lots of other benefits in
159. terms of creating assets. There's access
160. to credit that stimulates infrastructure
161. and so on, which also stimulates
162. speculation and clearing. Within the soy
163. and agroindustry sector, what you
164. begin to see is enormous access to
165. credit and
166. financialization. Again, it links up to
167. infrastructure expansion and its
168. associated deforestation, and also as it
169. becomes regulated, it starts to seek out
170. areas with less regulation. So, it kind of
171. goes to frontiers, and it also goes into
172. other Amazonian countries that have less
173. developed regulatory apparatuses
174. compared to the Brazilian case, that
175. there's big shifts, and that actually, an
176. unusual labor absorbing dynamic occurs.
177. Part of this is urbanization, but part of
178. it is also clandestine economies.
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