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Historic Peasants Versus Public and Private Conservation Units of the Paraguay River in the Pantanal Wetlands

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Historic Peasants Versus Public and Private Conservation Units of the Paraguay River in the Pantanal Wetlands Belgeo Revue belge de géographie 4 | 2016 Sustainability of rural systems: balancing heritage and innovation Nature enclosures: historic peasants versus public and private conservation units of the Paraguay River in the Pantanal wetlands of western Brazil Le combat des pêcheurs-fermiers traditionnels contre les responsables de la préservation des réserves naturelles bordant le fleuve Paraguay dans les marais du Pantanal (Brésil occidental) Scott Hoefle and Ana Maria Bicalho Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/19677 DOI: 10.4000/belgeo.19677 ISSN: 2294-9135 Publisher: National Committee of Geography of Belgium, Société Royale Belge de Géographie Electronic reference Scott Hoefle and Ana Maria Bicalho, « Nature enclosures: historic peasants versus public and private conservation units of the Paraguay River in the Pantanal wetlands of western Brazil », Belgeo [Online], 4 | 2016, Online since 30 December 2016, connection on 01 May 2019. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/belgeo/19677 ; DOI : 10.4000/belgeo.19677 This text was automatically generated on 1 May 2019. Belgeo est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Nature enclosures: historic peasants versus public and private conservation u... 1 Nature enclosures: historic peasants versus public and private conservation units of the Paraguay River in the Pantanal wetlands of western Brazil Le combat des pêcheurs-fermiers traditionnels contre les responsables de la préservation des réserves naturelles bordant le fleuve Paraguay dans les marais du Pantanal (Brésil occidental) Scott Hoefle and Ana Maria Bicalho Research funded by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq - Brazil) and the Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ – Brazil). The authors would like to thank the help of the researchers Ana Paula Araújo, Icléia Vargas, Aguinaldo Silva of the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul and André Siqueira of the ECOA who were also involved in the field research undertaken in 2015. Consuming “nature” and ethnic-class cleansing 1 The Pantanal of western Brazil is the largest wetlands complex in the world and is of such importance that the World Wildlife Fund considers it to be one its thirty-five global priority areas (WWF, 2016). The biome is spectacularly beautiful and presents exuberant flora and fauna which attract foreign and domestic tourists and in recent decades has been the object of GO and NGO environmental agencies. Based on field research undertaken in the swampiest low-lying part of the Pantanal in 2015 the plight of the historic fisher-farmers of the Paraguay River is treated. The local people are classic riverine peasants who are mixed descendents of Amerindians and settlers from other Belgeo, 4 | 2016 Nature enclosures: historic peasants versus public and private conservation u... 2 parts of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, who have lived in the wetlands for generations and are now being forced to leave areas deemed important for full nature conservation. 2 Two theoretical perspectives are used to interpret the case study: 1. global critical political ecology, which denounces carbon colonialism involved in neo-liberal trade-off agreements permitting continued pollution in exchange for conservation projects in less developed countries as well as the green washing of unsustainable and socially inequitable activities such as tourism (Hoefle, 2013a, 2016; Forsyth, 2003; Peet et al., 2011; Singer, 2015; Taylor, 2015) 2. radical environmental history, which questions the intentions of upper-class Western environmentalists whose dualistic vision of society/culture separated from an essentialised Nature causes the removal of the rural poor from conservation units, which once duly cleansed of this offending visual pollution are then consumed in the form of eco-tourism benefiting wealthy individuals from metropolitan areas (Adams and Mulligan, 2003; Dowie, 2009; Jacoby, 2014 [2001]). 3 In 2015 field work was undertaken along the Paraguay River in the part between the city of Corumbá and the state boundary with Mato Grosso, which was part of broader, long- term research on Pantanal ranching done in cooperation with researchers from local universities since 2002 (Figure 1). The research team interviewed eighteen fish-farmers (in a universe of 111) and the last remaining small rancher and medium rancher. In addition, the manager and four workers on one of the three private ranch-nature reserves were interviewed as well as the caretaker of a former ranch which is now a fishing camp. The field work ended with participation in the public hearing which determined the fate of the local fisher-farmers. Figure 1. Private and public conservations units in the Pantanal. Source: Adapted from MMA (2016). Belgeo, 4 | 2016 Nature enclosures: historic peasants versus public and private conservation u... 3 The Pantanal wetlands 4 The Pantanal is an important nature area in Brazil located in a depression surrounded by mountains and plateaus. It occupies an area of 192,600 km2 on the border between Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, of which 150,000 km2 are located in Brazil. The depression is a Quaternary sedimentary basin located within the Upper Paraguay River Basin. The Pantanal has a semi-humid tropical climate with well defined monsoon seasons. During the rainy season between October and March, large quantities of water pour off the Brazilian Central Plateau into the Pantanal depression and form alluvial fans subject to extensive flooding. The Paraguay River overspills up to twenty kilometres from its margins, invades low-laying land, blocks the outflow of tributaries and so increases the area flooded (Assine, 2004). 5 According to how much land goes under water during the wet season local people identify three general landscapes: low Pantanal, high Pantanal and plateau. Seasonally flooded prairie and permanent lakes and rivers are found in the low Pantanal, sedimentary prairie with limited flooding is encountered in the high Pantanal and savannah on the surrounding plateaus and forest in the mountains dominate terrain above the Pantanal flood plain. 6 Cattle raising was introduced during the colonial period in order to exploit the lush native pasture which appears seasonally on the floodplain. The Pantanal was only effectively colonised in the 19th Century by ranchers who arrived from the South-east, set up enormous estates and intermarried forming clans which spread out over the countryside (Sodré, 1941). To work the ranches peons of Amerindian and mestizo origin were recruited from both sides of the border with Bolivia and Paraguay. The remaining Amerindians who insisted on hunting cattle like any other animal of the chase were confined to reservations located outside the Pantanal, which became slums in the countryside where alcoholism and suicide rates reached alarming levels (Oliveira, 1976). 7 The Pantanal has always been sparsely populated and this has intensified in recent decades with population leaving the countryside to live in regional cities. Corumbá is the most important city of the Pantanal and had an urban population of 93,452 inhabitants in 2010. The part of the Pantanal treated here is located in this municipality which in 2010 only had another 10,251 inhabitants spread over an area of 64,931 km2 with a population density of 0.6 inhabitants per km2 (IBGE, 2010). Many of the people who left the countryside were drawn to better educational and health services available in the city but employment opportunity was limited given the depressed state of the local economy which is a shadow of its glorious past when it was the port through which salted beef exports went to Argentina. During the course of the 20th Century railroads and highways connecting the Pantanal to eastern Brazil progressively got closer and cattle were driven to rail and road heads from where they were taken to processing plants for fresh and canned beef for the expanding markets of the industrial cities of South-east Brazil (Pereira, 1949; Sousa, 1949). Salted beef no longer went to the River Plate countries located downstream and Corumbá turned into a depressed backwater city. 8 Today the economy of Corumbá is based on providing regional social services, nature tourism and legal and illegal transactions across the border with the Bolivian city of Puerto Suárez, the only significant Bolivian port on the Paraguay River. However, not Belgeo, 4 | 2016 Nature enclosures: historic peasants versus public and private conservation u... 4 even free-port transactions are important like they are in Brazilian cities located further downriver on the Paraguay border. Corumbá is a four to five hour drive from the booming state capital of Campo Grande which is too far to be convenient so that commercial establishments attending to Brazilian customers located just across the Bolivian border in Puerto Suárez are of modest dimensions. 9 A climatic event in the early 1970s further depressed the economy of Corumbá. Two successive years of abnormally high rainfall clogged the outflow of water and changed the course of alluvial fans so that most of the municipality remained permanently flooded after the event. The road from Corumbá to Cuiabá, the state capital of Mato Grosso, never came out of the water and was abandoned. The traditional large ranches went bankrupt and the peon workers lost their jobs. Those who remained in the countryside squatted on land located in
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