Activists Follow As Markets and States Transnationalize Northeast Brazilian Sugarcane, 1954-1989

Title: Activists Follow as Markets and States Transnationalize Northeast Brazilian Sugarcane, 1954-1989

Abstract:

History not only repeats itself in patterns that are again evident in the recent expansion of bioenergy production, but also informs current perspectives of key cause-oriented organizations such as the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT—Comissão Pastoral da Terra), whose office for Northeast Brazil remains based in the same city of Recife where this conference takes place. Examples of these historical patterns include commonalities in how Peasant Leagues opposed the expansion of sugarcane production for sugar, alcohol and ethanol during the 1950s-1964 period on the one hand and in how the CPT sharply opposed the recent expansion of sugarcane for ethanol on the other. Both the distant and the recent oppositions are mainly based on a sense that the expansion of sugarcane production has an indirect negative impact on land redistribution. As for how the past informs the present, two terms used in the title of this conference serve to exemplify those historical legacies: CPT’s well-known preference to frame bioenergy as ‘agro-energy’ as well as its distinctively third worldist understanding of ‘Pan American.’

Briefly and transnationally, this presentation analyzes how markets and states shaped an activist campaign that shares historical patterns and legacies with more recent bioenergy campaigns following its own 1954-1989 timing. The campaign initially mobilized after world sugar prices rose in 1945 such that as of the early 1950s landowners increasingly maximized their sugarcane output by pressuring their wage laborers to produce more and by converting to sugarcane land that had previously been allotted or rented to peasant sharecroppers or tenants. Next, the struggle cohered in 1955 during the 1st Peasants’ Conference of Pernambuco (1º Congresso de Camponeses de Pernambuco) with support from the chairperson of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)—namely, Josué de Castro. The campaign subsequently grew more intense between a 1959 Cuban revolution that brought foreign communist support to the struggle, a U.S.-supported invasion of Cuba in 1961 that instilled in campaigners the fear of a similar invasion into Brazil, and a U.S.-backed 1964 Brazilian regime transformation—from democracy to autocracy—that demobilized the campaign. The campaign then shrank in quantity and moderated in quality through exile and/or U.S.-funded repression and cooptation of the relatively more radical activists. It later reinvigorated with Brazilian expansion of bioenergy production in response to the 1973 oil shock, eventually leading to the foundation of the aforementioned CPT in the late 1970s. The campaign ultimately dissolved with the 1989 disbanding of the Soviet Union. The northeast Brazilian city of Recife, which harbors the port from which most Brazilian sugar was exported abroad during the campaign, remained the campaign epicenter from 1954 to 1964 and an important campaign hub throughout the 1954-1989 period. This centrality is evident in the prominent international visitors that Recife hosted during these years, including U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, U.S. politician Edward Kennedy, U.S. bureaucrat Sargent Shriver, U.S. activist Ralph Nader, Pan-American Che Guevara’s mother, and fatefully not U.S. president John Kennedy—whose assassination brought to an end plans honoring the statesman’s wish to visit Recife in the heart of what he had famously described as “the most dangerous area in world.”

The presentation focuses on process-tracing how markets and states shape cause-oriented action in transnational relations. It traces market and state causalities through two processes: one variously known as internalization or defensive transnationalism and to a lesser extent another known as radiation from supply chains certified to be socio-environmentally responsible. These process-tracings tend to feature the activisms of cause-oriented actors such as CPT and sugarcane labor unions getting themselves into some tension with one another.