Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ethnographic Analysis of Linkages between Rural Land Dispossession, Land Use Change, and Deforestation

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The research supported by this award will investigate the human causes and consequences of agricultural expansion with accompanying deforestation. Deforestation's environmental impacts, including soil erosion, increased flooding, desertification, and habitat loss, are well-established. Logging can be a deforestation trigger, but agriculture is its biggest driver. Small-scale farmers cut wood for fuel and clear modest spaces for crops; mechanized, industrial farming and large-scale ranching clear larger tracts. Industrial agriculture has increased food production and reduced local food shortages. But because these large scale operations require access to expensive technologies and farming inputs, the expansion of industrial agriculture has also pushed poor rural farmers off their lands into cities and into the global flow of migrants. This confluence of agriculture, deforestation, urbanization, and migration changes local environments, destabilizes local politics, and impacts migrant receiving countries, including the United States. These processes are well-documented on a global scale, but the local-level micro-processes that set these effects off in the beginning are much more poorly understood. How exactly does mechanized agriculture expand into forested areas? How do smallholders lose control of land? Why do so many end up leaving for urban areas? These are the questions the research funded by this award will address.The research will be carried out by University of Arizona anthropology doctoral student, Cari Tusing, with the supervision of senior anthropologist Dr. Linda B. Green. Because these processes have already taken place in the United States, where industrial agriculture is now the norm, Tusing will travel to Paraguay where industrial soy farming is just now moving into forested areas, dramatically modifying the landscape and giving Paraguay a deforestation rate that is among the highest in the world. The researcher will concentrate data collection in the region surrounding the Paraguay-Brazil border, where Brazilians are crossing into Paraguay to develop land for large-scale agriculture and ranching in an area where Paraguayan small-scale farmers and Guarani Amerindians practice agroforestry and subsistence agriculture. The researcher will collect data on land titling; class, race, and national identities; and cultural understandings of the relationship between agriculture and deforestation. For this phase of a multi-phase project, the investigator will focus on the Brazilian (also called Brasiguayo) farmers to document their farming practices, strategies employed to obtain land, and social and economic networks. Data will be collected with multiple social science methods including participant observation, interviews, and farm transect walks. Comparable data have already been collected on small-holder farmers and Guarani Amerindians. Cumulatively, the three data sets will produce a fully rounded account of the nature of recent land-use change and its effects on agricultural production, deforestation, local livelihoods, and rural-to-urban migration.