Making Sustainable Palm Oil? Developmentalist And Environmental Assemblages In The Brazilian Amazon

• Author: Diana Córdoba,Renata Moreno,Daniel Sombra
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10704965221090602
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

The Journal of Environment &

Development

2022, Vol. 31(3) 253–274

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10704965221090602

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Making Sustainable Palm

Oil? Developmentalist And

Environmental

Assemblages In The

Brazilian Amazon

Diana Córdoba

1

, Renata Moreno

2

,

and Daniel Sombra

3



Abstract

The question of how to generate development while preserving the environment is

central to the history of the Brazilian Amazon. Many decades of top-down state in-

terventions conceived and executed under a developmentalist framework have re-

sulted in a socioenvironmental crisis. In response, the Sustainable Oil Palm Production

Program (SPOPP) was launched in 2010. It promised to break with developmentalist

visions and articulate environmental and sustainability concerns. This paper uses as-

semblage thinking to examine how these contrasting, often impossible-to-balance,

views manifest within SPOPP implementation. We describe how non-human actors

(trees, diseases, previous policies and agroecological zoning technologies) interact with

human actors. However, powerful actors, in the state and beyond, continue to garner

support for their developmentalist interests and thwart or depoliticize environmental

and social concerns, thus limiting change.

Keywords

palm oil, Brazil, Amazon, agrarian development, assemblages, developmentalism

1

Department of Global Development Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

2

Department of Social Sciences and Economics, Universidad Autónoma de Occidente, Cali, Colombia

3

Center for Environmental Studies (NUMA), Universidad Federal Do Par´

a, Belem, Brazil

Corresponding Author:

Diana Córdoba, Department of Global Development Studies, Queen’s University, 68 University Avenue,

Kingston, ON K7L 3N9 Canada.

Email: Diana.cordoba@queensu.ca

Introduction

In February 2008, the Brazilian federal government launched Operation ‘Arco de fogo’

(Arch of Fire) in the northern state of Par´

a as part of its strategy to combat deforestation

in the Amazon –a subject garnering strong national and international concern since the

1990s (Josenaldo, 2008). More than 1000 federal and state soldiers and policemen

destroyed 1326 illegal charcoal kilns, seized 245 tons of illegally logged timber, closed

about 50 unlicensed sawmills and imposed R$31.8 million in f‌ines (Josenaldo, 2008).

The deforestation was occurring alongside acute social conf‌lict and alarming violence

rooted in land disputes and precarious working conditions in the sawmills and charcoal

ovens (Nepstad et al., 2001). The Brazilian state saw this crisis as an opportunity to

advance both environmental concerns over deforestation and developmentalist issues

like agribusiness development and social justice objectives for economic integration of

small farmers.

In 2010, Brazil introduced the Programa de Produção Sustent´

avel do ´

Oleo da

Palma (Sustainable Oil Palm Production Program, SPOPP), which aimed to facilitate

the expansion of large-scale plantations for biodiesel production throughout the region.

Then-President Lula da Silva of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT or Workers’Party)

discursively connected oil palm, socio-economic development, conservation and the

social and environmental crises in the Amazon region. Speaking to an audience of

peasants, agribusinessmen and local authorities at SPOPP’s launch, Lula hailed it as a

sustainable initiative for the Amazon:

The program we are launching today opens a new horizon of possibilities for Brazil and the

Amazon region. It represents the marriage between environmental protection and

generation of income and decent employment for thousands of people who live in the

Amazon. Today, Brazilians can proudly say that we protect the Amazon, one of the

greatest natural patrimonies of the Planet (Biblioteca Presidencia da Republica, 2010, p.4,

emphasis added).

SPOPP promoted a new kind of palm oil governance that led with sustainability. Its

policies aimed to prevent deforestation and recover degraded lands; facilitate the

economic integration of family farmers through access to f‌inancial support, knowledge

and technology transfer, and adequate training; and develop the biodiesel sector

through blending targets with diesel and specif‌ic support incentives (Mota et al., 2019;

Brandão et al., 2021). The SPOPP radically transformed the landscape in the Northeast

Amazon, quadrupling the number of palm oil hectares from around 50,000 in 2009 to

226,835 in 2020 (Abrapalma, 2021).

Critical scholarship often frames the rapid expansion of palm oil in the Brazilian

Amazon since 2010 as a top-down state–agribusiness alliance that dispossessed

peasants and Afro-Brazilians from their land (e.g. Acevedo, 2010;Backhouse, 2013).

SPOPP allowed agribusiness to incorporate new land stocks into the international

commodities market, while farmers linked to palm oil cultivation did not reap the

benef‌its (Backhouse, 2013;Cordoba et al., 2018). More mainstream scholars examine

254 The Journal of Environment & Development 31(3)