Family farming, agribusiness and the state: Building consent around oil palm expansion in post-neoliberal Brazil

Abstract

This paper analyzes the politics of oil palm expansion and state intervention in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Pará. The Workers' Party (PT) envisioned moving away from previous neoliberal policies by using state support to facilitate the coexistence and synergetic nexus between the state, family farmers and agribusiness, through the Sustainable Oil Palm Production Program (PPSOP) launched in 2010. Using a Gramscian approach, we examine PT's ability to impose its hegemonic project and the contradictions that emerged from its efforts to ease capital accumulation and to support marginalized family farmers to legitimize oil palm expansion. We argue that, in light of the articulations and fragmentation generated in the PPSOP intervention, the PT played a key role in providing a common framework that facilitated oil palm expansion in which all the actors involved could find a response to their claims. While agribusiness moved to participate in PPSOP to legitimatize the monoculture of palm in international markets and to create the material and infrastructural conditions for monocrop expansion, family farmers and popular movements granted support to this intervention based upon concerns for land access and titling, and with the hopes for alternative agricultural activities and job creation to improve their livelihoods. We show, however, that PPSOP intervention works to reinforce large-scale production and exclude family farmers and popular movements by promoting the concentration of land ownership and failing to improve the terms of incorporation of marginalized actors in the oil palm chain.