Narrating an Afro-Brazilian Landscape: Cascading Crises of Climate, Labor, and Development in Bahia’s Oil Palm Agroforests, and How to Talk about Them

Keywords: climate change, palm oil, agroforestry, agroecology, Bahia, Brazil, Latin America, political ecology
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper thinks with Afro-Brazilian agrarian communities to (re)frame threats to palm oil agroforestry, biodiversity, and foodways in Bahia, Brazil. While global palm oil production, as well as the stories we tell about it, remain dominated by the horrific social-environmental violence of plantation monocultures, Bahia’s palm oil agroforests provide an enduring counterpoint to agro-industrial development and extraction. Regrettably, a cascade of interconnected crises are threatening the region’s biodiverse groves, along with the vibrant communities and cultural forms that depend on them. Disruptions in local climates, especially once reliable precipitation patterns, combine with a collapse of the labor market for oil palm harvesting and decades of top-down pressures from capital-intensive agricultural development to destabilize the region’s palm oil economy, creating a crisis in production. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and content analysis from 2021-2022, this paper shows how official and authoritative perspectives are exploiting these crises to shape public narratives and reinforce their long-held neoliberal development goals. It proposes instead a series of alternative stories based on the oral histories, empirical experiences, and onto-epistemologies of the communities that actively (re)produce Bahia’s ancestral palm oil landscapes and economies. While authorities leverage socioecological disruptions to justify their calls for plantation monocultures and other top-down development interventions, narratives and proposals sourced in local communities seek to place palm oil landscapes and economies on paths toward social, environmental, and climate justice. The paper concludes by placing this sort of climate justice storytelling in broader context to demonstrate how community-oriented approaches might lead to more just outcomes.