• Agroforestry: (Agrossilvicultura) is an agricultural approach of using the interactive benefits from combining trees and shrubs with crops and/or livestock.
• Malthus (1766-1834): o excesso populacional era a causa de todos os males da sociedade (população com crescimento geométrico, e alimentos com crescimento aritmético)
• Boserup (1910-1999): upned the assumption of Malthus that agricultural methods determine population (via food supply). Instead, she shows that population determines agricultural methods (“necessity is the mother of invention”).
• Sharecropping: a system of agriculture or agricultural production in which a landowner allows a sharecropper to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land.
• Staple food: a food that forms the basis of a traditional diet, typically inexpensive foods of vegetable origin that are high in energy and carbohydrate and that can be stored for use throughout the year. Its name may be used synonymously with “food” in some contexts, such as the reference to “our daily bread” in The Lord's Prayer, and a common greeting of “Have you eaten rice?” denoting “How are you?” in certain cultures.

Abstract: This paper examines the recent development of the açaí fruit economy in regional Amazonian urban markets (as a staple food) and more recently among national and international consumers (as a fashion food) and the consequences for agroforestry intensification by Cabloco communities in the Amazon estuary. The paper is based on long-term ethnographic research and field experiments; the açaí fruit economy is discussed from agricultural, social and economic perspectives; attention is given to its historical development, the structure of açaí fruit production, its agents, the relationship among themselves and the urban markets. Decadal price performance is presented for açaí fruit and açaí transportation costs and compared to major agropastoral products for the Eastern Amazon region. Dominant views about the 'economic rationality' of rural producers' decision-making are discussed. Açaí fruit has performed as well as and in some cases surpassed most agro-pastoral products of the Northern region. Economic returns for producers reflect linkages between price signals from urban markets, harvest decision, and land tenure condition of the producer. Urban markets for the fruit is expanding and bringing new participants to the açaí fruit economy further conditioning the ability of rural producers to take advantage of external markets for forest products. Discussion of factors conditioning agricultural development and integration between urban and rural areas conclude the article.

To what extent are production and market opportunities diminished by a history of sociocultural prejudice, land tenure insecurity, and differential access to economic incentives, thus reproducing cycles of underdevelopment even under ideal market conditions?

The interpretation of agrarian economies and forest crops in the Amazon requires attention to historical and socio-cultural perspectives underlying their insertion into wider markets.

Açaí is a food source crucial to the region's urban areas (e.g., açaí is consumed twice as often as milk in the capital of Belém, Rogez 2000), and provides a supply that has allowed national and international expansion of a commodity that is seen by many as key to achieving regional sustainable development. However, even the sustainable development discourse often reproduces cultural stereotypes that reinforce the region's vertical socio-political structure (Nugent 1993).

In fact, the ability of the industry to move from a fashion to an acquired consumption basis depends, at least in part, in adapting the taste and form of açaí fruit to culturally distinct markets.

A combination of a solid regional market (as a staple) and and emerging external market and transformation industries (as fashion) underlies an increasingly complex socio-economic structure now in place.

Caboclo patterns of land use often are based on the coexistence of intensive and extensive activities that minimize risk while guaranteeing farm consolidation and expansion of market activities.

A view in which caboclos have a condition of “social pathology” tends to characterize producers as passive and depending on outside help to foster intensification of production and economic development.

Despite the modification of species composition, the managed areas largely retain the structural characteristics of the floodplain forest (e.g., basal area and biomass), but with an overwhelming concentration of individuals of economic value.

In summary, the limitations of intensification measures to evaluate the production system can be summarized as follows:

• Production technology is based on local management knowledge and presents low levels of input factors used to characterize intensity.
• The agroforestry structure can fit into both extremes (intensive or extensive) of Boserup's frequency model, depending on the definition of stages of production.
• Spatial dimensions overlap areas of intensive, intermediate, and unmanaged areas, which allows expansion according to environmental conditions and household needs and possibilities.
• The multiple prductivity dimensions of agroforestry areas (i.e., the “hidden harvest” of other fruits and raw material) tend to go unnoticed as economically relevant production.
• Floodplain cycles dictate cropping frequency more than the fallow period used in Boserupian models

Whereas the cost of transportation can hover around 10 percent of açaí prices at the beginning and at the end of the season, it can reach 25 percent or more at the season's peak, when the fruit price is lower. Whereas owners are free to wait for better prices, sharecroppers need to follow their landlords' shedules and decisions. In most estuarine municipalities, sharecroppers are the largest category of producers.

One can easily say that if the forests they are currently using were truly native forests, the state of Para would be achieving no more than 30 percent of its current production of açaí fruit.

Interestingly, the so-called rational management techniques presented by companies and aimed at increasing productivity not only have been learned and practiced for decades but were developed by the very people to whom the companies are offering technical assistance.

It is likely that today's açaí export economy would not even exist if riverline farmers had not been managing açaizais intensively for decades and were simply relying on “native” areas. […] This bias [against the caboclos] contributes to the perpetuation of a cycle of differential access to important economic opportunities, such as bank loans, under the guise of “promoting sustainable development.”

Although the goverment is working with established industries, little has been done to build producer-controlled transformation industries and commercialization infrastructure. As described earlier, producers are “supported” in their position as extractivists who receive “help” from new participants, sometimes in the form of repackaged technology that has long been in use in the region.

Regional improvements in agropastoral technology and processing are urgently needed but should be built on existing knowledge and carried out through the support of education and training, lines of credit, and storage and transformation cooperatives, among other services. Most importantly, however, political support is needed to overcome land tenure conflicts and provide access to credit incentives and basic infrastructure in order to develop commercialization infrastructure and high-end transformation industries that will generate jobs and increase the circulation of capital in the region.

Abstract: In much of the Amazon Basin, approximately 70% of the population lives in urban areas and urbanward migration continues. Based on data collected over more than decade in two long-settled regions of Amazonia, we find that rural-urban migration in the region is an extended and complex process. Like recent rural-urban migrants worldwide, Amazonian migrants, although they may be counted as urban residents, are often not absent from rural areas but remain members of multi-sited households and continue to participate in rural-urban networks and in rural land-use decisions. Our research indicates that despite their general poverty, these migrants have affected urban markets for both food and construction materials. We present two cases: that of açai palm fruit in the estuary of the Amazon and of cheap construction timbers in the Peruvian Amazon. We find that many new Amazonian rural-urban migrants have maintained some important rural patterns of both consumption and knowledge. Through their consumer behavior they are affecting the areal extent of forests; in the two floodplain regions discussed tree cover is increasing. We also find changes in forest composition reflecting the persistence of rural consumption patterns in cities resulting in increased demand for and production of açai and cheap timber species.

This paper focuses on the production system of açaí fruit, based on the estuarine floodplain environment, that has become the main economic activity for a large number of towns. Açaí occurs naturally in the floodplain forest, and together with its multi-stem regeneration capacity, makes it a species highly suitable for management. Açaí palm also provides the so-called heart of the palm, or palmito, which is one of the main export products of the Amazon estuary.

Agricultural intensification, conventionally defined, is synonymous with deforestation and also implies the ability to keep a place deforested over time.

This paper is organized into three main parts. The first is a literature review of its main topics: agriculture intensification and the co-development of the cabloco's agricultural system and the extractivist economy. This first part concludes with an analysis of the spatial dimensions of land use in the accounts of agriculture intensification and sustainability. In the second part, data from a study site in the Amazon estuary are used to exemplify the socio-economic structure, management, production, and mapping of açaí agroforestry. Two sets of data are used. The first concerns 12 sites where agroforestry and vegetation inventories were carried out to measure how management changes vegetation structure and composition; the second set comes from eight sites used as experimental agroforestry areas during the harvesting season to measure production of açaí at the levels of stem, clump, and the whole agroforestry area. The third part of the paper presents, in the light of the study area's data, a discussion of the suitability of using conventional intensification measures to account for intensification in agroforestry systems, such as that of açaí. The paper concludes with a review of the extractivism stigma carried by cablocos and how a revision of the agriculture intensification concept, based on the example of açaí agroforestry, can help to build an identity as rural producers.

Abstract: An agent-based model was developed as a tool designed to explore our understanding of spatial, social, and environmental issues related to land-use/cover change. The model focuses on a study site in a region of the Amazon frontier, characterized by the development of family farms on 100-ha lots arranged along the Transamazon highway and a series of side roads, west of Altamira, Brazil. The model simulates the land-use behaviour of farming households on the basis of a heuristic decisionmaking strategy that utilizes burn quality, subsistence requirements, household characteristics, and soil quality as key factors in the decisionmaking process. Farming households interact through a local labour pool. The effects of the land-use decisions made by households affect the land cover of their plots and ultimately that of the region. This paper describes this model, referred to as LUCITA, and presents preliminary results showing land-cover changes that compare well with observed land-use and land-cover changes in the region.

a model which proposes that land-use changes in the region should be understood as a product of the age and gender characteristics of farm households as they interact with local environments and external factors. This conceptual model maps out a trajectory for families, which relates the type of agricultural practices pursued to the available capital resources and labour pool within each household.

The newest version of LUCITA is implemented in Repast. The raster landscape is represented by two grids, one indicating land cover and the other soil quality.

Households are permitted to arrive to the cellular space, bur only if available plots exit. Different strategies for arrival times, such as sequential or simultaneous (Dale and Pearson, 99)

Although calculated profit returns seem to be the ideal determinant for crop selection, this is typically not done in the Altamira region. Instead farmers use crop prices as a proxy for return revenues such that a crop with a higher price per kg will yield greater returns than crops with a lower price per kg.

A household is able to seek out labourers when it has sufficient capital to meet its labour demand.

The simulation results are similar to another result found in the literature.

A model of individual human decision making at the household level is linked through a geographical space to a model of ecosystem behaviour. The goal […] is to explore the potential of a spatially referenced agent-based model, for understanding how behaviour at the local level interacts with natural processes to produce observable phenomena at a higher level.

Brazil being a very large country with very different climates and cultural traditions, the immigrants brought with them varied approaches to land use that require that attention be paid to household behaviour, rather then assume that they all behave in ethnically equivalent terms.

LUCITA - land-use change in the Amazon. It is implemented in Swarm, and comprised by two submodels: ecological and human. The ecological submodel is capable of modelling the impacts of deforestation on soil properties, the relationship between soil fertility and successful crop yields, etc. It has a genetic algorithm for classify and generate rules to be used by the agents. The human system submodel can be best described by the architecture of an autonomous household agent. Each household agent is representative of a colonist family and male labour pools, and available liquid capital. How families make land-use decisions, given the characteristics of their natural environment, their economic environment, and their own households. This model maps out the trajectories for families, which relates the type of agricultural practices pursued to a number of factors including the available labour pool within each household. The model describes five stages in the life of a household. In the early stages of household development, limited family labour supplies lead to a reliance on annual crops and associated high rates of deforestation. In the later stages of household development of pastoral lands and/or perennial crops.

It proposes an integration with GIS but most of the work has to be done manually. There is a need for additional data collection efforts. The authors conclude that this is an starting point for other works coupling natural and human models.

Abstract: A Landsat TM scene from July, 1991 was analysed for an area of the Amazon estuary in Ponta de Pedras, Marajó Island, Brazil. Distinctive spectral signatures were determined for 14 land-cover classes, including upland and floodplain forest, three stages of secondary succession, palm forest, mangrove, pasture, and three types of savannah. Image classification (unsupervised and supervised using a hybrid maximum-likelihood/texture algorithm) of the study area was conducted using the 14 classes spectral statistics informed by 1992 vegetation inventories and fields studies documenting historical land use. The use of field-based information supportive of classification resulted in individual test field class results which ranged from 81 to 100 percent individual class accuracy. Historically, attainment of good accuracy for many of these classes using satellite data has been difficult, but this research indicates suitable accuracy can be obtained using TM data when carefully integrated with detailed ground surveys. Elements of the classification were focused on addressing the difficult problem of identifying the conversion of “natural” to “managed” floodplain forest. The combination of feature classification using computer-analysed TM data in conjunction with detailed ground measurements/surveys permitted identification of subtle changes in natural forest that was associated with conversion to managed floodplain forest.

O seminário teve por objetivo aprofundar o conhecimento científico sobre o desmatamento na Amazônia, a partir do ponto de vista da comunidade científica, das organizações não-governamentais, dos empresários e dos tomadores de decisões. A idéia foi realizar um amplo diálogo entre esses atores para sistematizar recomendações aos tomadores de decisões. A proposta de debate nasceu de dois eventos recentes relacionados ao desmatamento: (a) o lançamento do Plano Desmatamento Zero por nove ONGs em outubro de 2007, contestada por cientistas da Rede Geoma; (b) a polêmica em torno dos números publicados pelo INPE em janeiro de 2008, contestados pelo Governo do Mato Grosso, que indicavam um possível aumento das taxas de desflorestamento após três anos consecutivos de queda.

O Dr. Alfredo Homma (Embrapa Amazônia Oriental) defendeu na sua palestra que o problema da Amazônia não é ambiental, mas sim de falta de política agrícola. Acredita que defender floresta em pé pode não ser a solução para conter o desmatamento. Sua proposta é recuperar a “segunda natureza” (áreas abertas e degradadas) para transformá-las em uma “terceira natureza”, com atividades mais adequadas. Citou entre outros:

• pecuária não deve ser vista como um inimigo a ser combatido, pois pode ser uma solução econômica para pequenos e médios proprietários (leite e venda de bezerros);
• a importância de incentivar culturas permanentes como diferencial para a agricultura familiar
• não se deve defender o extrativismo ou a exploração da biodiversidade como conceitos abstratos, pois existem possibilidades reais de negócio que o Brasil não está aproveitando, como o cacau e a borracha
• soluções extrativistas pontuais, dispersas, que favoreçam um grupo pequeno de pessoas, sem estruturação de mercados, são paliativas e de pequeno alcance;
• nos casos de sucesso, atividades extrativistas podem tornar-se uma ameaça ambiental (como no caso do açaí, que vem sendo plantado indiscriminadamente nas várzeas);

O Dr. Homma enfatizou também a questão da segurança alimentar. Citou como exemplo o Estado do Amapá, que busca criar uma economia florestal e, como resultado, importa alimentos produzidos no Pará, “exportando” o desmatamento.

Francisco Costa (Chiquito): Em um dos cenários apresentados, chama a atenção o papel da mineração. Fortes investimentos do setor podem gerar tamanhas transformações nas economias locais que poderiam tornar inócuas medidas focadas apenas no produtor rural, ressaltando que o papel da atividade mineradora na Amazônia deve ser considerado nas políticas de controle do desmatamento.

Um dos maiores problemas de industrialização e comercialização do açaí é sua característica altamente perecível. Entre a colheita e a confecção da polpa o açaí não resiste mais que 72 horas. O mesmo acontece com o “vinho”, ainda que mantido sob refrigeração. Para sanar esse problema as indústrias de sorvete da região submetem o suco concentrado à temperatura de -40C. Outra maneira de contornar essa dificuldade foi desenvolvida pela EMBRAPA, consistindo em fabricar o pó desidratado.

Com a intensificação do processo de globalização das economias e a conseqüente redução das barreiras tarifárias, essas vêm sendo substituídas por não-tarifárias. Os países desenvolvidos passam a impor barreiras sanitárias, ambientais e sociais como medida de proteção de seus mercados.