Paper short abstract:

The history of Central Brazil was marked by a biogeographical conquest. This study analyzes the history of agricultural colonization in Central Brazil, considering the Cerrado and Amazon biomes, and its areas of ecological transition involving history, ecology, and national and global development.

Paper long abstract:

The conquest of the interior of Brazil was also a biogeographical conquest. Historically the Brazilian interior was demarcated and defined within a political project of agricultural and demographic expansion. The biogeographical conquest of Central Brazil is intertwined with the history of the colonization of areas involving different biomes, particularly the Cerrado and the Amazon. The Cerrado is the biome with the largest territorial coverage in Central Brazil, and agronomic development policies for Central Brazil have historically been closely associated with the edaphic and agricultural conquest of this biome. But another territory was also established in the agricultural, scientific, and environmental history of Central Brazil, which involves not only the Cerrado and Amazon but also areas of ecological transition. This research aims to analyze the expansion of the agricultural frontier in the Cerrado-Amazon transition areas, using as references the relationship between history, ecology, and regional development policies. We aim to analyze the historical transformations in the landscape of the transition zone/interconnection of these biomes, and the policies, institutions, and other actors involved in national development programs between the 1940s and 1970s. Historically analyzing this area of ecological transition aims to contribute both to the understanding of territoriality, with its specific spatial, social, and historical dynamics, as well as understanding of the political and ecological asymmetries between these biomes. Our argument is that these asymmetries are constituted and explained historically, and they can enlighten us about the complexity of perceiving biomes and the different socio-environmental conflicts that exist between them.

Paper short abstract:

In a 1956 meeting, Senegalese local politicians confronted French colonial officials over the technocratic design of a massive rice cultivation project. They articulated a vision of a future characterized by flourishing agrarian production, in opposition to colonial capitalist agriculture.

Paper long abstract:

Following the upheaval of World War II, France embarked on an ambitious program of developmental imperialism, investing substantial public funds in its colonies’ infrastructure and agriculture. Massive state-led projects meant to “rationalize” production and stabilize imperial trade networks frequently came into conflict with longstanding local economic systems. This conflict is vividly illustrated by the transcript of a 1956 meeting where French and Senegalese officials discussed the rice-farming project known as the Mission d’Aménagement du fleuve Sénégal (MAS). In the meeting, the governor of Senegal and administrators who oversaw the MAS were confronted by councilors in Senegal’s Territorial Assembly, almost all of whom were Senegalese and many of whom hailed from the rural valley of the Senegal River. The councilors criticized the French administration’s inattention to the needs of rural populations, arguing that current MAS plans did not address the threats posed to agrarian communities by urbanization, state land management, and the expansion of colonial capitalism. Read alongside other Senegalese responses to French economic and agricultural policy, the heated discussion in the 1956 meeting illuminates tensions between industrialization and agrarianism, urbanization and ruralism, economic integration and economic autarky. I argue that the Senegalese councilors articulated a vision of a future characterized by flourishing agrarian production in opposition to colonial capitalist agriculture.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on German model farms in newly independent Tunisia, we analyze the informal imperialism of postwar development aid in a postcolonial setting, showing the ambitious agenda of German and Tunisian actors to transform the economic basis of (rural) Tunisian society as well as its social fabric.

Paper long abstract:

The end of formal imperialism in Mediterranean countries after World War Two was not the end of Western-European influences in the region. Especially West Germany’s foreign policy aimed to transform the Mediterranean basin into its economic backyard. This went hand in hand with new forms of political and economic advisory and expertise, in which agricultural experts played a prominent role. Reaching independence from French colonial rule in 1956, Tunisia seemed to be an “open space” for Western developmentalists and quickly became one of the most important receiving countries of West German developmental aid. This led (among other things) to the establishment of an “Animal breeding teaching and demonstration farm” in Bejaoua in 1957, and a few years later of a second model farm focused on animal husbandry in Sedjenane. Those German model farms are a perfect example of how breeding cattle can be understood as a way of maintaining imperial power structures after the end of colonialism. As a site of development action, they also allow to think about the complex interactions of human and non-human agency. They bring together the ambitious agenda of German and Tunisian actors to transform not only the economic basis of the local society, but also the social fabric of rural Tunisia: intensifying animal husbandry aimed at transforming a semi-nomadic society into a settled farmers society, while engineering local environments accordingly. However, they also open insights in the way, animals “resisted” this new logic of “breed engineering”.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the pre-WWII history of the National Land Settlement Administration in the Philippines. It shows the centrality of “the homestead” to the Philippine Commonwealth Government’s attempt at agricultural colonization in Mindanao, long considered as the Philippines’ “land of promise”.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the Philippines’ experience of agricultural colonization during the US colonial period (1898-1941). In particular, it focuses on the history of the National Land Settlement Administration (NLSA) before the outbreak of WWII. Established in 1938, the NLSA's ostensible goals were two-fold: to expand areas of agricultural production and to help landless tenant farmers acquire homesteads on the Philippine frontier. Between 1939 and 1941, the National Land Settlement Administration, with a P20 million budget, established three settlements in Koronadal Valley (Southern Philippines) where over 11,000 formal and informally recruited settlers came to work the fields. The paper demonstrates how Filipino political elites, in organizing the NLSA, were interested in the settler colonial experience of Anglo-America (US, Canada, Australia). Agricultural colonization provided a model, albeit a fraught one, to make a postcolony, that is, to construct a national economy under conditions of limited political sovereignty as well as to build a pliable small-holding agrarian citizenry. Nevertheless, the “weakness” of the emergent Philippine State meant that the nature of state-driven agricultural colonization would be informed by the technical, financial, and political challenges of land settlement in a tropical setting. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how the NLSA, as a government corporation, had ambivalent goals. It promised property ownership while funneling “homeseekers” into relations of debt and the burgeoning plantation economy. The early history of the NLSA not only helps us understand post-WWII land settlement projects in the Philippines but also the history of developmental authoritarianism in Southeast Asia.

Paper short abstract:

The paper studies agrarian technocrats using marginal lands in Taiwan to settle retired servicemen retreating from mainland China. Although some projects did succeed in generating profits, many were criticized for environmental consequences as the island democratized by the end of the Cold War.

Paper long abstract:

This paper studies the vision of marginal land development in Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), an agency created by the Republic of China (ROC) government with American aid in 1948. Following its defeat in the Chinese Civil War, the ROC relocated to Taiwan—an island inhabited by the Indigenous Austronesian peoples, settled by ethnic Chinese in the seventeenth century, ceded to Japanese in 1895, and took over by the ROC in 1945. To enhance the government’s legitimacy among the older generation of settlers, the JCRR redistributed lands from landed elites to tenant farmers. For the hundreds of thousands of soldiers arriving from the mainland, the majority stayed in the densely-populated western plains, but several thousands were recruited in the 1950s and 60s to develop what the state considered “marginal lands”: slopes and valleys in Indigenous territories and reclaimed tidal lands and riverbanks. This paper investigates how retired servicemen were envisioned by the ROC as anticommunist warriors fighting for the lost mainland, and by the JCRR as agents of development boosting Taiwan’s economy. However, although some highland orchards did become an economic success by the 1970s, many reclaimed lands failed to become agriculturally productive due to unfavorable environmental conditions. As the government democratized in the 1980s, both projects became focus of environmental struggle to reduce soil erosion in mountains and wetland destruction along the coast, and retired servicemen began to demand state compensation, thus demonstrating the ambivalent results of state-directed colonization during the Cold War.

Paper short abstract:

In 1988, the Romanian communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, started a pharaonic project, by which he intended to "modernize" the rural area. The project was far from feasible. It meant displacement of a population, the demolition of a European rural heritage and the erasure of a historical past.

Paper long abstract:

In general, political dictatorship have the ”advantage” of having the power to implement utopian experiments, on a national scale, with the aim of imposing a new world, and a different type of human being, called in this case "the new man”.

In 1988, the Romanian communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, started a pharaonic project, by which he intended to move the peasant to the block and thus recover all the land for agriculture, in order to obtain higher agricultural productions. It referred to the land under the villager’s houses, gardens, and even some roads and vacant lots. A population of approximately 3 million people was be transmuted from their traditional houses (which were to be demolished!) into blocks of flats. The new localities specially built were called “agro-industrial centers”, i.e. localities that ensured a lifestyle located between urban and rural. But the new blocks for villagers had many issues: they had no central heating, no running water – a way of life the regime insisted on calling “modernization”. The project was far from feasible, especially since there were riots of people who thus lost not only their house and garden, but also a lifestyle. It was about a displacement of a population, the demolition of a European rural heritage and the erasure of a historical past. The Soviet-inspired project had a political goal (not economic), that of gaining control over land and population. The fall of the regime in December 1989, would halt the project, which would have had catastrophic consequences.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how Kickapoos seeking refuge from the U.S. settler state became part of Mexico’s settler colonial project, revealing the long legacies of agrarian colonization projects and complicating the politics of citizenship and indigeneity at the heart of Mexican revolutionary rhetoric.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes how Native peoples seeking refuge from the U.S. settler state became part of Mexico’s own settler colonial project in its northern borderlands, arriving in the wake of decades of war against Yaquis and Apaches, among other Indigenous peoples of northern Mexico. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, traditionalist tribal leaders from Kickapoo, Cherokee, and Osage communities sought concessions from Porfirio Díaz’s administration to establish tribal colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora. This occurred in the context of the settler land rush and movement for statehood in Oklahoma. Ultimately, only the Kickapoos established a small colony in Sonora, but the story of all three tribes’ negotiations with the Mexican government and explorations of potential colony sites provides a unique window into transnational Indigenous history and land and resource sovereignty.

Tracing two distinct waves of Mexican agrarian colonization history, in Mexico’s pre- and post-revolutionary periods (1880-1910 and 1910-1950, respectively), I analyze how Kickapoos forged community and identity in northern Mexico and how they understood and enacted their colonization projects in relation to other communities in the region. Comparing the ways Kickapoos engaged with and were impacted by post-revolutionary reform shows how the Mexican government managed multiple stakeholders’ claims to land and natural resources and integrated various notions of property holding into revolutionary land reform. The Kickapoo case reveals the long legacies of agrarian colonization projects in Mexico and complicates the politics of citizenship, identity, and indigeneity at the heart of revolutionary rhetoric and scholarship on post-revolutionary land reform.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores state-directed ‘colonisation’ projects in twentieth century Bolivia, focusing on the entanglements between Indigenous-peasant ecologies and the non-human within agrarian landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores state-directed ‘colonisation’ projects in twentieth century Bolivia, focusing on the entanglements between Indigenous-peasant ecologies and the non-human within agrarian landscapes. Agricultural colonisation projects accelerated in Bolivia in the wake of the 1952 Bolivian National Revolution, with extensive assistance from the US, British and European governments. The Revolution’s architects envisaged a grand programme of internal colonisation of the lowlands known as the March to the East. Settling the sparsely populated, resource-rich lowlands with migrants from the Andean highlands both responded to demographic pressures in the highlands and valleys partly produced by climate change, and also provided an opportunity for the post-revolutionary state to initiate a new agrarian extractivism based around tropical agriculture on the Eastern frontier. Based on archival research in Bolivia and drawing on a multispecies, decolonial and posthuman theoretical framework, I argue that colonisation dramatically changed the ways in which highland Indigenous-peasants related to their agrarian landscapes. The peasantry’s role in the expansion of the agrarian frontier must be understood, therefore, as contributing to a dramatic transformation in both land tenure practices and ecological cultures in twentieth century Bolivia. Colonisation processes expose the fissures that emerged in the late twentieth century within and between Indigenous organisations regarding land, territory and development. By bringing to the fore the other-than human including insects, trees and pathogens this presentation further offers a multispecies approach to understanding historical agrarian colonisation projects in Latin America.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of private companies in agrarian colonization under Brazil's military regime, analyzing the Japanese-Brazilian PRODECER project. Aimed at transforming the Cerrado into modern farms, PRODECER sparked controversies over the future of Brazil's agriculture and sovereignty.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines debates over agrarian development in the Brazilian Cerrado region from 1979 to 1985, focusing on the influence of private companies in state-led frontier expansion. During this period, private entities assumed an increasingly pivotal role in the colonization of agrarian landscapes, exemplified by the initiation of the Japanese-Brazilian Cooperation Program PRODECER launched in 1979. The primary objectives of PRODECER were to settle approximately 100 families from diverse Brazilian regions on land parcels ranging from 300 to 500 hectares, providing them with credit and technical support. The consequences of this endeavor included the transformation of vast stretches of north-western Minas Gerais into a modern agricultural system, accompanied by the conversion of native Cerrado vegetation. The project involved public and corporate stakeholders from Brazil and Japan. Notably, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) envisioned the Cerrado as a key supplier of food products for the Japanese economy and international markets, sparking intense contestation in Brazil. These debates revolved around differing visions of Brazil's agrarian future, intertwined with questions of national priorities: should the focus be on domestic markets, aimed at sustaining the Brazilian population with staples like beans and manioc, or should it shift towards international markets, emphasizing cash crops like soy? These deliberations coincided with a burgeoning crisis in the Brazilian countryside, characterized by a growing population of landless peasants, and the re-emergence of civil society movements. Consequently, discussions surrounding land distribution, agricultural orientation, and national sovereignty constituted a potent mixture that challenged the legitimacy of the civil-military regime.

Paper short abstract:

The aim of this research is to study some specific experiences and patterns of agrarian colonization of internal areas in the South of Italy during the post-unification period.

Paper long abstract:

The colonization of wastelands is an essential factor in the anthropization and economic growth of a territory. In such a perspective, the aim of this research is to study some specific cases of agrarian colonization of internal areas in the South of Italy during the post-unification period to measure the impact and responsiveness of local communities to the legislative initiatives for land redistribution and reorganization of state-owned assets (especially the partition of common lands) promoted by the State. Particular attention was dedicated to the interaction between society and the environment and the relationship between landowners and peasants, essential factors for studying the development of agrarian colonization projects in a specific area. Some specific cases of "model" villages were analyzed, focusing on urban planning projects (types of housing, animal stables, etc.) and the distribution of agricultural land. The focus was centered on the province of Salerno (Campania Region) for a time span from the "state owned assets question" to the post-World War II (agrarian reform). The study was conducted through the documentation kept in the territorial state archives (Naples and Salerno), The Commissariato per gli Usi Civici per la Campania e per il Molise and the Central State Archives in Rome. The archival analysis was enriched with spatial elaborations carried out with GIS technology to geolocate the case studies and to observe the main land transformations in the long run.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the symbiotic and contradictory relations between the “planned” and “unplanned” consequences of state-directed colonization projects In the Catatumbo, a Colombian region in the border with Venezuela,

Paper long abstract:

One of the main concerns of Latin American agrarian reforms in the age of development was how to “rationalize” the expansion of the agricultural frontier. In Colombia, the expansion occurred towards the amazon piedmont, the Magdalena River Valley, and the border with Venezuela. There, state planning was immersed in symbiotic and often contradictory relationships with spontaneous colonization, and the long histories of human occupation of geographical spaces historically regarded as “empty frontiers”.

Through the case of Catatumbo Region, near Venezuela, this paper explores how colonization planning was expressed in a comprehensive rural development project of land titling, training, infrastructure and territorial planning. But this project, planned on an “archetypical” frontier space, had to deal with and assimilate to the biophysical reality of the region, and at the same time, face the ancestral presence of the Motilón-Barí people. In this context, INCORA tried to achieve a balance between infrastructures for agricultural development and conservation, on one hand, and indigenous and colono land titling, on the other.

Through the use of official sources from Colombia and Venezuela, historical newspapers, and indigenous and peasant land reclamations, I argue that Catatumbo’s planned colonization produced a set of infrastructures that materially and symbolically reshaped the region. In doing so, I want to inquire in the limits and contradictions of state-planned colonization projects in Latin America’s agricultural frontier.

Paper short abstract:

From 1950s agrarian colonization spread in Latin America. I analyze the concept of regional planning used by German geographers to study it. Based on a functional space, geographers zoomed out and imagined regions where effective colonization would bring welfare and modernization to countryside.

Paper long abstract:

Beginning in the 1950s, agrarian colonization projects spread throughout Latin America. Many were promoted under agrarian laws designed to promote rural modernization and provide land to peasants. Agrarian colonization accelerated after the 1960s under the Alliance for Progress. Promoting spontaneous and state-led colonization would avoid revolutionary agrarian reform and expand the arable land needed to launch the Green Revolution. Scholars from different disciplines tried to follow the ongoing projects and studied individual cases. Instead, geographers emphasized the need for a regional approach as a research method to study the colonies, but also to improve them. For geographers, region was more than a unit of analysis, it was a unit of projection of rural futures. In this paper, I analyze the concept of regional planning used by German geographers to study and project agrarian colonization in Central and Andean Latin America. Using different theories, such as Thünen's concentric circles and Christaller's central place theory, and a functional conception of space, geographers zoomed out colonies and imagined regions where the state would direct an effective colonization that would guarantee the welfare of colonists, the connection of colonies to local market centers, and the establishment of cash crops that would modernize the countryside.