PhD dissertation "From Landless to Forestless?"

Settlers, livelihoods and forest dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon

By Fabio Homero. Diniz

Hundreds of thousands of families have settled in the Brazilian Amazon within the Agrarian Reform Program (ARP), the rationale being to enable settlers to earn their living by small-scale farming and produce an agricultural surplus for sale. Further, the Brazilian Forestry Code requires settlers not to deforest more than 20% of forest on their properties, but in many projects settlers have deforested larger areas than this. However, specific questions about whether the settlers’ activities are, at the very least, providing their livelihoods, and about the effects of these choices on deforestation over time, have hardly been addressed. Located in five settlement projects in Eldorado do Carajás, southeast Pará State, this research investigated how settlers make their living; how their activities and practices affect forest cover changes; and how future prospects for both, i.e. people and forest, are envisioned.

The research produced five key messages: 1) small farmers within the studied ARP projects are less poor than often assumed; 2) there is a strong trade-off between livelihood security and environmental sustainability; hence primary forest deforestation continues, although the first signs of secondary forest transitions have been observed; 3) the settlers’ contribution to deforestation is less than often assumed because they contribute to emerging forest transitions and because local deforestation peaked before the projects; 4) policies strongly affect the settlers’ realities; hence their views are crucial for effective policymaking, including both the Forestry Code and agrarian reform policies; and 5) livelihood trajectories and forest dynamics models are more appropriate to capture the realities of the human–environment systems in the Brazilian Amazon than livelihoods as snapshots and unidirectional deforestation models.