6. Agroforestry intensification in the Amazon estuary

Abstract

AGRICULTURAL INTENSIFICATION lies at the heart of today's sustainable development agenda, and has been treated as the major focus of technology transfer to rural populations. Although it is common practice in the literature to criticize the way the term 'agricultural intensification' has been defined and applied, there have been few attempts to translate that into rural development policies and agricultural practices on the ground. The use of the term 'intensification' is frequently applied to factors of production, such as energy and capital input, rather than to land-use in general. Hence, classical accounts of intensification have the tendency to quantify it as proportional to increases in energy, technology, and capital input to a given area. Another dominant definition is that based on Boserup's model that refers to intensification as the process of increase of the frequency of use (or cycles of use) of a given piece of land. These focuses tend to overlook the maintenance of output yield over time and its relationship with other land-use and socio-economic facets of agriculture. This approach leads to emphasis on the substitution of local land-use strategies by external technology based on energy and capital intensive systems primarily focused on export-oriented agriculture. While concentrating on that, the tendency is to neglect investment to improve the existing socio-economic and physical infrastructure that would enhance local production systems, without threatening the local resource basis and economic and food security. This chapter discusses the application of intensification parameters to a food production system, the aqai agroforestry (Euterpe oleracea) of the Amazon estuarine flood plains. Aqai fruit is a top-ranked regional staple food, grown on the flood plain, and its management and production have become the main economic activity for a large number of estuarine towns. Aqai agroforestry is based on locally developed technology that maintains intensive, long-term staple food production in forested areas with simple technologies. Amazonian caboclos (native Amazonian rural populations) living in the flood plain have historically been the major contributors to regional agriculture and the forest economy. As the population grows in urban centres, their role and the use of the fertile flood plain tend to increase. Even more than mechanized agriculture and ranching which was the cause of upland deforestation, flood plain agroforestry has reached the crossroads of intensification and has become a major regional food production system. Despite its major importance, the aqai production system is generally regarded as mere extractivism, and has been treated as such in national socioeconomic surveys, by local populations, and by scholars (see examples of different considerations in Anderson, 1990, 1992; Calzavara, 1972; Chibnik,