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Once I took one of my kids to the Quilombola Territory of Laranjituba e África, located in Abaetetuba (state of Pará). We visited the home of a quilombola woman, known by everyone in the area as Chica. In the middle of our conversation, she took us to a nearby forest to show us what was there. It was an unexpected and enchanting lesson, where the different species were easily identified, and their uses explained in detail, as well as the risks posed by some of them. Timbó, for example, is a plant that stuns fish when thrown into the water, which can make them to be easily caught by hand. It is no longer used as it was in the past because of the damage it causes.
Guilherme Carvalho holds a PhD in Socio-Environmental Development Science of the Humid Tropics from the Centre for Advanced Amazonian Studies at the Federal University of Pará (NAEA/UFPA) and is a popular educator at the NGO FASE Programa Amazônia.
In this same community there is another quilombola, known as Vavá, who frequently affirms that the forest “is his supermarket”, where everything he needs is available, always at hand. He also has an extensive knowledge about trees, the right time for planting different species, and the relationship between them, animals/insects/fungi, with the moon, the sun, the tides, the forest deities, and the community. Just like Vavá and Chica, there are other people from the territory with important knowledge for ensuring the community's way of life. Where does all this knowledge come from?
I am from the Amazon. I reflect on the world through my roots in this land. Therefore, instead of beginning this article's analysis by focusing directly on bioeconomy, I seek to show that the ancestral ways of life established here are opposed to the propositions of this concept. They are based on assumptions that are incompatible with it, given that bioeconomy is associated with a project of colonizing power.
According to Vitor Toledo and Narciso Barrera-Bassols, modern society “suffers from amnesia”, a biocultural amnesia that is particularly evident “among the most sophisticated urban and industrial sectors”, which “tend to lose their ability to remember”. It is as if we have been taught to forget. For these authors, the first sign of oblivion is precisely the fact that modern individuals do not feel themselves to be part of nature.
The detachment between society and nature — or humanity and nature — is one of the pillars that sustain the capitalist system and the modern conception of society. From these conceptions derive narratives, government and state policies, initiatives by national and transnational economic conglomerates, as well as proposals to address the climate and environmental crises based on the strengthening of institutions and market mechanisms — especially those linked to financial speculation. All these initiatives, among others, share a view of nature as something external to us, which must be dominated, controlled, and exploited, generating profits and benefits for the real power holders.
This is where we encounter the reflections of Ailton Krenak, who asks us: are we really one humanity? According to him, we have been building our vision of humanity at the same time as we have been conceiving ourselves as separate from nature:
For a long time, we have been lulled by the story that we are humanity. Meanwhile, we have become alienated from this organism of which we are a part, the Earth, and we have come to think that it is one thing and we are another: the Earth and humanity. I do not see anything that is not nature. Everything is nature.
Following a perspective very close to that of Krenak, Nego Bispo loudly proclaims that we should not be humanists, because humanism has disconnected itself from nature, as it is linked to proposals and initiatives that uproot us, materialized in the notion of development. In this case, de-development means non-involvement or non-belonging. For Bispo, development and disconnection are strongly intertwined, the first being a variant of what he calls cosmophobia, which expresses the desire to move away from the first towards the second.
Going back to Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, they think that not being able to remember shows how blind modernity is. So, breaking out of this situation means, among other things, turning our attention to Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, because they hold the memory of the species. This is not a memory based on short-term experiences and learning, but one that goes back thousands of years. According to the authors, it is in this memory of the species that we find “the key to deciphering, understanding, and overcoming the crisis of modernity, by recognizing other ways of living among ourselves and with others — between the modern and the pre-modern, and between humans and non-humans, that is, nature or cultures”. The fact that modernity has become ‘a prisoner of the present’, according to the authors, is what makes amnesia a characteristic of our time.
Bioeconomy is presented as a way to protect the territories and ways of life of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, but this also does not correspond to reality.
This analysis poses a double and significant problem: by turning our backs on the past, we fail to learn from it. On the other hand, the future ceases to present itself as a field of possibilities — and therefore of affirmation of utopias that break with the structural constraints of this society — as it is based on notions of historical linearity and ascending time, as expressed in the concepts of development and progress. In fact, Brazilian economist Celso Furtado once stated that these were the two driving ideas that legitimized all the atrocities committed by colonizers on our continent.
The Amazon is not only the result of natural processes that have occurred over millions of years. It is also the historical and cultural result of human action. In other words, it has been cultivated for thousands of years. Human presence in the Brazilian Amazon dates back at least 11,200 years, with records found in the Caverna da Pedra Pintada cave in the municipality of Monte Alegre (state of Pará).
From these records, it was possible to observe that the peoples of that region knew how to manage a diversity of available resources and employ appropriate techniques to access and use them. The Amazon was never a green hell, as some claimed, a hostile environment that stifled the potential of the peoples who established themselves here.
Nego Bispo defends the idea that it is necessary to develop what he defines as a war of names. According to him, in order to “transform the art of naming into an art of defence, we decided to name as well”, which, in short, constitutes “the game of countering colonial words as a way of weakening them”. For example, there are terms that can only express forms of colonization, domination, and unequal power relations. This seems to be the case with the so-called bioeconomy, whose counterpoint could well be biointeraction, a term raised by Nego Bispo in opposition to so-called sustainable development. However, is it all just a play on words, or is there something deeper at stake? This is what we will seek to address below.
Unsustainable without Violating Rights
The term bioeconomy has become a panacea that can be everything and nothing at the same time, just as the notion of sustainable development was for a long time. This does not mean that it does not have a very specific function, which is to justify the control of territories by corporations.
It emerged in the 1970s with the Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who sought to apply principles of biophysics to economics in an attempt to understand it from the perspective of natural sciences. Later, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union began to use it to promote the use of biotechnology in the development of products and markets. Therefore, it is deeply linked to capitalist expansion strategies in an era of financialization of intangible natural elements, such as carbon.
Mining companies, agribusinesses, loggers, oil companies, real estate developers, port operators, and other economic sectors use the term to justify a multitude of projects that have great potential for environmental destruction and the destruction of ancestral ways of life. The federal and Pará state governments and large companies invest heavily in advertising and marketing to defend and encourage the installation of logistics complexes. In addition, they seek to greenwash initiatives that are highly polluting and destructive to ways of life and the natural environment, such as ports in the municipality of Barcarena (PA); the duplication of the ore pipelines of the transnational companies Hydro and Artemyn — former Imerys, now belonging to the Flack Group; the Araguaia-Tocantins waterway; the paving of the BR-319 highway connecting Porto Velho (RO) to Manaus (AM); Ferrogrão — whose route will connect Sinop (MT) to the Port of Miritituba, in Itaituba (PA); and the construction of the Marabá hydroelectric plant (PA).
The bioeconomy pursued by these segments is deeply linked to financial speculation on a global scale. However, there is a common thread in the actions of these hegemonic groups and their allies who defend it — corporate media, the justice system, parliaments, conservative factions of different religions and others. The thread is the material and symbolic appropriation of ancestral knowledge produced by Indigenous peoples and traditional communities from different parts of the planet, since the memory of the species lies precisely among these social actors.
Bioeconomy, sustainable development, agrofuels, biofuels, human capital, economic capital, biotechnology, clean market, green companies, green certification and others are terms that reproduce the logic of exclusion of large segments of the world's population.
In order for the interests of national and transnational corporations and their allies to be achieved, various strategies must be adopted. Let us begin with the first: “selling” the idea that the bioeconomy is fully aligned with ancestral ways of life, as if it reproduced the relationships that these maintain with each other and with nature. From there, a whole narrative is constructed based on the supposed sustainability of government and private enterprises. Alongside this, they seek to consolidate in society the view that the bioeconomy is, in fact, an innovation, something that projects the future in the defence of life on the planet.
The second is to try to consolidate the view that the bioeconomy breaks with past forms of exploitation and destruction. However, in reality, corporate solutions to the climate and environmental crises have little commitment to the structural changes needed to reverse the situation in which we find ourselves.
Third: bioeconomy is presented as a way to protect the territories and ways of life of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, but this also does not correspond to reality. The very existence of these collective actors has become a threat to the capitalist system. This is because they are living proof that there are other ways of relating to nature. There are other forms of sociability and organization that are not based on profit, class division, and exploitation, thus restoring the notion of the future as a field of possibilities rather than a single, linear, upward trajectory.
The fourth has to do with the fact that the bioeconomy is presented by its advocates as a holistic view of territories and the relationships within them. To achieve this purpose, they attempt to link this notion to images of the lifestyles of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities, whose ancestral knowledge has contributed to making the forest what it is. However, one of the characteristics of capitalist globalization is precisely to promote the unity and standardization of landscapes, procedures, tastes, ways of life and consumption, thoughts, desires and more, which clash deeply with a holistic perspective. Not to mention the fragmentation also produced in this process of expansion. Meanwhile, ancestral peoples are characterized by diversity, balance, unity, sharing, interaction, cosmologies that form the basis of good living, solidarity, and values distinct from those of capitalist society.
The fifth is based on the fantasy that the bioeconomy respects the socio-territorial rights of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities. To reflect on this issue, we must turn to an important question raised by professor and jurist Rubens Casara: do we really live in a democratic state governed by the rule of law? It has become commonplace to speak of a crisis of the state. Casara counters:
…if the situation that is claimed to constitute a “crisis” takes on an air of normality, or rather, if the assertion of the existence of a crisis is inherent (and functional) to the status quo, if the characteristics that make up the “crisis” never go away (nor can they go away), if the crisis becomes “permanent”, it is necessary to investigate whether there really is a crisis. A permanent crisis, which is functional, useful for generating profits from the production of new services and goods, as well as the repression necessary to maintain the political and economic project imposed in a given state, is no longer a negativity, a deviation, but rather a positivity dear to the neoliberal model. One can then think of the use of the term “crisis” as a rhetorical device, as a discursive element capable of concealing the structural characteristics of the current model of the state.
This is precisely the focal point of our argument: bioeconomy, REDD+ and the carbon market, among many other “market alternatives”, are expressions of this “positivity” in an environment where the neoliberal model permeates the state and society. Such “alternatives” can only advance in an environment of constant rights violations. There is no way for capital to expand without the use of violence, both material and symbolic, against Indigenous peoples and traditional communities.
In the Amazon, traditional communities have been constantly pressured to sign 30 or 40-year contracts for the sale of carbon credits, whose clauses are draconian. They impose restrictions and various forms of punishment without allowing them to carefully consider the consequences of these “agreements” for the continuity of their ways of life, a very common occurrence in the Baixo Tocantins region, near Belém. For example, the Suruí-Aikewara Indigenous people, whose villages are located in the southeastern mesoregion of Pará, had their images shared by a consulting firm unknown to them to offer carbon credits to economic groups in Brazil and abroad. And Carbonext, a company linked to Shell, has been accused of violating the rights of Indigenous peoples in carbon credit contracts. On the other hand, community protocols based on the Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) have been ignored. As a result, the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consultation has not been implemented. Not to mention the corruption scandals and other crimes committed by climate brokers, such as those that occurred in the municipality of Portel (state of Pará).
The marketing surrounding bioeconomy uses the symbolic capture of ancestral and/or traditional ways of life to gain legitimacy among different audiences. In addition, it seeks to present practices that have been carried out for millennia or centuries by peoples and communities as something new. This capture also extends to social movements, leaders and NGOs, which often serve as intermediaries for the co-opting of groups that defend forests and their socio-territorial rights. Therefore, the struggle for alternatives that truly address the structural causes of the climate and environmental crises is also a struggle in defence of democracy and for overcoming the hegemonic model of de-development.
Bioeconomy, sustainable development, agrofuels, biofuels, human capital, economic capital, biotechnology, clean market, green companies, green certification and others are terms that reproduce the logic of exclusion of large segments of the world's population. The bio of the market has nothing to do with us, simply because it is not about life, but about profit and power.
The views expressed here are strictly those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions to which he is affiliated. Translated by Bianca Pessoa.
