Rondônia’s Pioneer Farmers

1. Rondônia’s Pioneer Farmers “We migrated to Rondônia with nothing, but the shirts on our backs. This wasn’t easy. But we made a better life for ourselves.”

2. Most of Rondônia’s first generation of pioneer farmers arrived on this frontier between 1975 and 1985, typically young families settling on forestland without clear legal land titles. Thirty years later half of them still lack documents of definitive legal ownership. During the early years, there were frequent conflicting claims over the same land and violence was common. By 2010, the rambunctious frontier has settled down and many of that generation successfully raised families and improved their living standards, but at a heavy price – the loss of primary forests that once stood tall on the landscape. Now, the aging first generation looks back on the pioneer experience with mixed emotions. In this photo gallery we paraphrase some of the amazing life stories that these kind and determined people shared with us.

3. Although they came from many places of origin – Bahia, São Paulo, Minas Gerais – the largest proportion came from the State of Paraná. Most were landless sharecroppers working on large coffee plantations. When large-scale agriculture began to shift to mechanized soy bean production, these sharecroppers were “let go.” The Brazilian government’s program to open the frontier into Rondônia, as a rural “labor safety valve” was linked to it’s larger strategy for agricultural modernization in the Southeast. Hundreds of thousands of displaced rural households moved, most reluctantly, to the uncertainties of the frontier. And, most of the migrant farmers we worked with for 20 years, they did make it through: a hard-won success.

4. Twenty of the 50 participants in the Rondônia Agroforestry Pilot Project shared their life stories with us, focusing on their initial years settling in the frontier. For most of these twenty, the move occurred in stages. First, the male household head arrived and stayed in local urban areas, until they found work as a day-laborer on the farm of someone who preceded him. Then their spouses arrived, and the men ventured into the forest to stake-out a land claim (marcação). Typically all of the land along an existing road from the town was already claimed. So, the newcomers would set-out on foot trails deeper into the forest, sometimes walking 50 kilometers, until they reached a stretch of land that was 500 paces wide without any other clearings (land claims). With machete in hand, these men would begin to clear enough vegetation to “mark” their claim to others. Typically, it took a year to receive a “provisional land title” from the government.

5. After marking the land with small forest clearings, perhaps several return trips later, a rough shelter was built from local tree branches and vines, palm fronds, and scrap lumber that they carried-in on their backs. Other family members then moved in. Everyone got sick, mostly from malaria. Many went into debt, and some ultimately lost their land claims to usurious moneylenders, for medical treatment. Some, whose land claims were remote, waited a year or more from the roads to arrive, subsisting on native fruits, nuts, small game, and on occasion a ball of rubber latex for pocket cash. The spider monkeys that populated the forests then were often their diet instructors. When the roads arrived, the homesteaders cleared larger areas, often sharing their labor with neighbors, and began planting annual food crops – beans, rice, maize. Then, these pioneers were compelled to sell their surplus produce to predatory middlemen, anybody with a truck willing to buy and transport a few bags of rice and beans to the market. “It’s a miracle we even survived, but now, for the first time, we have our own land. It was worth it!”

6. “Only God knows why I did not die. Malaria came really strong on me! No health assistance was available and most of us had no money to buy medicines. Everybody suffered a lot. We had to carry people on our backs…’ ‘but, I have been able to survive. Before Rondônia we had nothing, not even a place to live, and now we have.”“When we first arrived the forest was a dangerous place. My wife fussed every time I went out to cut down a tree…’ ‘Now I think differently about the forest. Here in Rondônia, the forest contains many resources. A person doesn’t need to cut forest. Instead, one can use the forest resources to survive..” “We should have started planting trees a long time ago. If I had planted trees since the beginning, I would have some money from that right now.”