Transforming power in Amazonian extractivism: historical exploitation, contemporary "fair trade", and new possibilities for indigenous cooperatives and conservation

Brian Burke

doi:10.2458/v19i1.21720

Abstract

Cooperatives have been widely supported as vehicles for community-based conservation and development. However, these organizations are often developed around specific income-generating projects rather than broader considerations of how relations of power and ecological exploitation might be transformed. This article uses the case of AmazonCoop—a cooperative dedicated to the supposedly fair trade of Brazil nuts between Amazonian indigenous people and the multinational corporation The Body Shop—to illustrate how historical political ecology might facilitate the design of more radically transformative cooperatives. Contextualizing AmazonCoop within the history of Amazonian extractivism, and particularly the extraction of wild rubber, reveals the specific mechanisms and processes through which indigenous people have gained and lost power. This analysis thus creates opportunities for thinking more creatively about how contemporary conservation–development schemes might pursue ecologically sustainable and socially just social transformations.Keywords: cooperatives, fair trade, conservation, development, indigenous people, Brazil

Highlights

Conservationists increasingly strive to design programs that foster community participation in natural resource management and link conservation with income-generating development activities. This turn away from the old fences and guns approach to environmental protection is rooted in concerns that top-down conservation programs that do not alter local people's incentives to exploit natural resources achieve neither ecological goals nor more general commitments to social justice, poverty reduction, and community participation
That cooperatives and similar associations often serve as vehicles for community-based conservation and development
Understanding the impacts of AmazonCoop requires that we investigate the history of Amazonian extractivism, and the history of the rubber industry

Summary

Introduction

Conservationists increasingly strive to design programs that foster community participation in natural resource management and link conservation with income-generating development activities This turn away from the old fences and guns approach to environmental protection is rooted in concerns that top-down conservation programs that do not alter local people's incentives to exploit natural resources achieve neither ecological goals nor more general commitments to social justice, poverty reduction, and community participation. I re-insert questions of power and history into the discussion of cooperative-led conservation and development through an examination of AmazonCoop This cooperative—which was dedicated to the supposedly fair trade of Brazil nuts between Amazonian indigenous people and the multinational cosmetics company The Body Shop—was founded on the hopes that extraction of non-timber forest products could promote conservation and development for indigenous people and that corporate– cooperative partnerships could achieve the economic and social promises of cooperativism. Conflict management, balance local and exra-local control, establish clear resource rights, and proffer the resources necessary to apply those rights (Stearman 2006)

AmazonCoop

Historical struggles in Amazonian extractivism

Findings

Considering power and history in cooperative design