A politicized ecology of resilience - Redistributive land reform and distributive justice in the COVID-19 pandemic - Berghahn Journals
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A politicized ecology of resilience
Redistributive land reform and distributive justice
in the COVID-19 pandemic
Jonathan DeVore
Abstract: Brazil has endured multiple political, economic, and environmental
crises—and now the COVID-19 pandemic—which have drawn social inequalities
into razor sharp relief. This contribution analyzes the resilience of rural families
facing these crises in southern Bahia. These families have benefited from various
redistributive policies over the years, including redistributive land reforms (RLRs),
conditional cash transfers (CCTs), and recent emergency aid (EA) payments re-
lated to the pandemic. Each (re)distributive approach involves different notions
of distributive justice informed by competing background theories of “the good,”
which hold implications for concepts of resilience. Drawing on long-term research
with RLR communities in Bahia, this article considers the gains achieved by dif-
ferent redistributive programs. Families who acquired land through RLR projects
appear more resilient, especially in the face of crisis.
Keywords: Brazil, cash transfers, COVID-19, distributive politics, ethical life, land
rights, resilience
Crisis in Brazil’s redistributive politics cash transfer (CCT) program, Bolsa Família—
which enrolls 14 million families—contributed
Latin America witnessed a “Pink Tide” early to 12 percent of this reduction (Mendes 2015:
in the twenty-first century, as progressive-left 77, 85). Meanwhile, since its inception, Brazil’s
governments achieved power and implemented federal redistributive land reform (RLR) pro-
numerous policies to redress the region’s status gram has settled 1.3 million families,1 although
as the most unequal in the world. Following little attention has been paid to quantifying the
successive Workers’ Party (PT) governments program’s outcomes for inequality. In recent
(2003–2016), Brazil’s Gini coefficient, previously years, however, several Latin America coun-
the highest in Latin America (World Bank 2016: tries have made sharp political turns rightward,
103), dropped from 63 in 1989 to 51 by 2014. with policies implemented during the Pink
Economists estimate that Brazil’s conditional Tide suffering various cuts (Encarnación 2018).
Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (2021): 1–15
© The Authors
doi:10.3167/fcl.2021.031101
2 | Jonathan DeVore
Since taking office in 2019, Brazil’s current Shortly after the arrival of COVID-19 in
president, Jair Bolsonaro, has eroded previous Brazil, the bureaucratic infrastructure for Bolsa
achievements in reducing poverty and inequal- Família was deployed to distribute emergency
ity, and his responses to COVID-19 have been aid (EA) (Auxílio Emergencial) payments to
disastrous. low-income Brazilians, including informal, un-
In this contribution, I draw on long-term employed, and self-employed workers. These
research with RLR communities in southern payments represent a partial (and temporary)
Bahia, Brazil, including 38 months of fieldwork universalization of Bolsa Família, which were
since 2002 and remote research during the pan- distributed from April to December 2020, al-
demic. My earlier research in this region traced though not without political struggles over eligi-
multigenerational struggles for economic free- bility and payment levels. Meanwhile, as political
dom among freed slaves, their descendants, and elites fought over the distribution of cash to the
other members of the rural poor, from the late masses early in the pandemic, rural families in
nineteenth through the early twenty-first cen- southern Bahia began expanding their gardens
tury (DeVore 2014). In 1997, as a part of these to secure their subsistence.
ongoing struggles, local families occupied sev- Far from denying the importance of cash
eral abandoned plantations; the nascent agro- transfers, conditional or otherwise, I am con-
forests that they cultivated there, which I first cerned with the temporal durability, and struc-
encountered in 2002, are mature orchards today. tural outcomes, of different redistributive pro-
My long-term research in the region thus enables grams. One group of scholars recently asked
me to consider intergenerational outcomes of whether or not, and in what ways, cash trans-
RLR policies for families in these communities. fers are “transformative” (Molyneux et al. 2016);
In earlier explorations of how these families while results were mixed, most contributions
have weathered other recent crises, I suggested focused on human and social capital to the
that RLR beneficiaries appear particularly re- neglect of basic means of (re)production, such
silient in the long term (DeVore 2016, 2019a). as land and dwelling space. More recently, I
Yet, there has been little research on longitudi- have argued that cash transfers represent what
nal outcomes of RLR policies, in contrast with Nancy Fraser (1995) calls an affirmative, rather
CCT programs such as Bolsa Família, which than transformative, solution to social dispari-
have been widely studied. Resilience is not the ties (DeVore 2019a). Whereas affirmative and
sole meaningful criterion for assessing redis- transformative strategies seek to correct “ineq-
tributive policies. CCTs have led to undeni- uitable outcomes of social arrangements,” trans-
able improvements in child healthcare, food formative remedies dismantle the “underlying
security, and education and provided millions political-economic structure” (Fraser 1995: 84)
of women with greater access to household fi- that reproduces disparities across generations.
nances (Papadopoulos and Leyer 2016). Some While cash transfers may play transitional roles
research, however, raises doubts about CCT’s in social transformation, they may also occasion
outcomes for food security and child nutrition new stigmas and instances of social misrecogni-
in rural areas (Piperata et al. 2016). Other evi- tion (Balen 2018; Morton 2014; cf. Fraser 1995:
dence points to the precarity of gains achieved 85). RLR, by contrast, portends a transformative
by CCTs. A rural Brazilian woman interviewed solution to disparities by redressing maldistri-
in the documentary film, Disruption (Kinoy et butions of means of (re)production.
al. 2014), poignantly commented that if Bolsa Different redistributive programs involve
Família were to suddenly end, then life would notions of distributive justice informed by dif-
return to “the same suffering,” just like before ferent background theories of “the good” (Tay-
the program began. lor 1986: 36), which shape competing conceptsA politicized ecology of resilience | 3 of resilience. In Section 2, I describe the ethno- tation called Nossa Senhora, which they would graphic context of my research, before suggest- spend the next two decades transforming into ing how different concepts of resilience relate diversified agroforests (Figure 1). For Joana and to different notions of “the good” in Section 3. Damião, owning a small plot of land was a nec- Informed by the “capabilities” approach to jus- essary element of a good life and an important tice (Nussbaum 2003), in Section 4 I describe step toward achieving freedom from wage labor. how CCTs operate on what economists call hu- The occupation of Nossa Senhora was part of man capital, or the knowledge, skills, and hab- wider land rights mobilizations that swept Ba- its necessary to transform children into reliable hia’s cacao zone in the 1990s, after a fungal dis- wage laborers. James Ferguson (2015) is critical ease devastated the region’s cacao plantations. of human capital approaches and identifies a The ensuing crisis led to many bankruptcies, competing theory of distributive justice in the mass worker layoffs, and the abandonment of “rightful share,” a concept of social ownership thousands of hectares of plantation land. In the informing proposals such as universal basic wake of this crisis, unemployed plantation la- income (UBI). While EA payments in Brazil borers formed diverse land rights organizations are not UBI, they help actualize the horizon of to occupy dozens of plantations in the region. UBI possibility. In Section 5, I suggest that RLR Today, like the peasantries that commanded so programs advance beyond the rightful share by much anthropological ink in the mid-twentieth democratizing ownership of material sites and century, these former plantation laborers are means of (re)production. RLRs are informed by smallholders, able to creatively allocate land and an ecological background theory of ethical life labor in response to shifting political and eco- outlined in Section 3. In Section 6, I consider nomic circumstances. As the price of beans sky- how RLR beneficiaries have fared so far during rocketed early in 2016, for example, Joana and the COVID-19 pandemic before concluding. Crisis in ethnographic context In September 2016, I called Joana and Damião, family farmers in one of several RLR commu- nities established in Bahia’s cacao zone in 1997. We talked about ongoing events in Brazil at the time: the economic crisis, the Zika virus, Presi- dent Rousseff ’s ouster, and the threat of budget cuts under Temer. Damião and Joana described the effects of the crisis on life in the cacao zone. As many plantation workers had been laid off, they wondered if land occupations like those that occurred in the 1990s would recur (DeVore 2014: 603–644). But for their part, Joana and Damião did not suffer from the crisis as acutely as others. In the early 1990s, when they still lived from plantation labor, surely they would have felt the squeeze. In 1997, however, their lives changed when they joined with other fam- Figure 1. Early stages of agroforest cultivation ilies to occupy the forests of an abandoned plan- at Nossa Senhora. Photo by author, 2002.
4 | Jonathan DeVore
Damião planted a plot of their own and did not to “the same suffering” as before if Bolsa Família
have to buy beans for months.2 came to an end.
A few years later, in April 2020, I called
Joana and Damião to talk about the emerging
COVID-19 crisis. They told me about how the Resilience and an ecology of ethical life
pandemic exacerbated hardships already suf-
fered by the region’s landless laborers. Yet, as Resilience is a contested concept drawn from the
before, Joana and Damião did not feel the ef- physical sciences to characterize how “systems”
fects as acutely as others. Instead of spending regain “equilibrium” in the wake of systemic
their time harvesting cash crops, whose market “stressors” (see Davidson 2010). As applied to
prices were trending downward, they focused social relations, some iterations of the concept
on their gardens, planting subsistence crops have been critiqued for resuscitating function-
whose use-values were decoupled from the vi- alist social theories and “engineering resilience”
cissitudes of the market. approaches to society (Bollig 2014; Hornborg
The economic freedom that Joana and 2009; MacKinnon and Derickson 2012: 256). In
Damião achieved on the land helped them re- a neoliberal key, resilience discourses can jus-
main resilient in the face of layoffs, rising prices, tify the dismantling of the welfare state (Walker
threats of budget cuts, and now a pandemic. In and Cooper 2011), as the quasi-naturalized “re-
recent months, however, few (if any) analysts silience” of indigenous, Afro-descendent, and
have drawn attention to the resilience of RLR poor people generally may be used to suggest
beneficiaries facing the pandemic. Instead, most that they do require support from the state (Na-
analysts have called for cash transfers to support dasdy 2007). Some depoliticized or even re-
people who lost their livelihoods. Indeed, there gressive theories of resilience may thus rein-
is little doubt that cash transfers are necessary to force existing disparities. Critical social theories
mitigate suffering, both during acute crises such can recapture resilience discourse, however, by
as COVID-19 and the normalized “everyday” highlighting the “political constitution and so-
crises faced by many people around the world. cio-cultural embeddedness” of both “systems”
In the long term, however, cash transfers are in- and “stressors” (Bollig 2014: 253, 274); any ade-
sufficient, as their distributive potentials remain quate theory of social resilience must attend to
deferred to the future. “distributive, political, and cultural” dimensions
Moreover, cash transfers are vulnerable to of socio-ecological disparities (Hornborg 2009:
prevailing political circumstances, while cash 255).
itself is subject to the vicissitudes of the market, Through their land rights struggles, RLR
including price inflation, price gouging, and beneficiaries in southern Bahia advance a po-
other value-destroying processes. Unlike hard liticized concept of resilience, informed by an
assets such as land, cash transfers are subject to ecological vision of ethical life, which considers
a wider variety of political and economic cir- how the different goods that figure in redistrib-
cumstances under which the value of redistrib- utive struggles (cash, food, houses, land, among
uted goods—including overall gains in social others) come together to support human flour-
wellbeing—can be lost, cancelled, reversed, or ishing—and even flourishing with non-humans
otherwise defeated and undone. I call these cir- (DeVore et al. 2019). These different goods can
cumstances conditions of defeasibility (DeVore be analytically distinguished according to their
2016, 2019a) to highlight the durability and vul- defeasibility conditions, which is a conceptual
nerability of different goods mobilized by com- distinction that calls for closer analytic attention
peting (re)distributive struggles. Goods persist to the manifold social, semiotic, and material
and recede in different ways, as suggested by the vulnerabilities through which different goods
woman who commented that life would return can be lost, extinguished, and otherwise comeA politicized ecology of resilience | 5
to an end. This is not a mere academic distinc- imal” (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]: xxii). The Stoic
tion but an idea that suggested itself over years conception of ethical life thus excises the self
of attending to how rural families in southern from (ecological) relations with others and to
Bahia orient to the goods that make differences other goods; under the Stoic conception, resil-
in their lives, as they are acutely aware of, and ience becomes self-reliance.
attentive to, the durability and defeasibility of Nussbaum, by contrast, argues for a “political
those goods. Their appreciation for such condi- approach that makes good sense of our relation
tions shapes their preferences for the distribu- to the other animals, and to our own animality,
tion of some goods over others, as some goods our permeable bodies, our growth and decline”
condition the possibility for other more “com- (2001 [1986]: xxiii)—and thus a view of ethical
plex” or “complete” goods.3 life “vulnerable to reversal” (2001 [1986]: 6).
Conceptually, these ideas draw on Aristotle’s Human wellbeing, and “all of our powers, in-
observation that human flourishing involves an cluding our moral powers,” Nussbaum contin-
integrated complex of activities, relationships, ues, “are worldly and in need of worldly goods
and material goods: “external goods, goods of for their flourishing” (2001 [1986]: xxii). Under
the soul, and goods of the body” (Aristotle 2000: this conception, resilience entails an ecology of
13). Much recent scholarship in the anthropol- ethical life, as selves are embedded with, and
ogy of ethics draws on a view of Aristotelean constituted through, manifold relations to oth-
virtue ethics (MacIntyre 1981) that focuses on ers, including external goods.
ethical “self-formation” (Laidlaw 2014), or the These observations not only hold implica-
cultivation of (what different moral traditions tions for the “appropriate distribution and redis-
deem) virtuous emotions, desires, conduct, and tribution of material goods” (Nussbaum 2001
habits. Analytically, this scholarship tends to a [1986]: xxii). Acknowledging vulnerability and
self-ward orientation, bracketing wider mate- reversibility, moreover, holds implications for
rial circumstances—including Aristotle’s “ex- understanding the role that external goods can
ternal goods”—in and across which selves are play in the lives of those facing tragedy and loss.
constituted and consummated. The intellectual Rural families in southern Bahia are not only
framework informing CCTs is similarly oriented aware of the importance of external goods but
self-ward with its focus on the human capital— also the conditions under which those goods
habits, conduct, emotions, desires—necessary to can escape from their control. Their sensitivity
transform children into reliable wage laborers. to loss is shaped by experiences of earlier gen-
Aristotle’s account of external goods, how- erations, whose land was violently taken from
ever, supports a broader ecological notion of them through protracted land grabs between
ethical life, according to which achieving wellbe- the 1950s and 1970s (DeVore 2017a, 2018).
ing not only means fashioning and refashioning Tragedy and loss in their own stories thus in-
the self; it also means cultivating relationships form their practical sense of distributive justice,
with others—trees, for example, or friends (de including their attunement to the durability and
L’Estoile 2014)—through which and with whom defeasibility of goods that can make a difference
wellbeing can be achieved. By contrast with the in their lives.
Aristotelian perspective on external goods, the
Stoic ethical tradition—which pervades mod-
ern liberalism—claims that wellbeing requires The rightful share: Beyond human capital
nothing beyond the self. The Stoic tradition,
Martha Nussbaum argues, “severs need from dig- CCTs propose two broad solutions to pov-
nity” (2001 [1986]: xxii–xxiii) and severs human erty, operating at two timescales captured in
wellbeing from external goods, based as it is the proverb: “Give a man a fish, and you feed
on a “sharp split between the human and the an- him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed6 | Jonathan DeVore
him for a lifetime.” The first clause proposes to share do not claim ownership over means of
ease immediate pangs of children’s hunger in (re)production. Rather, the rightful share is an
the short term, while the second clause aims at entitlement to revenue collected and redistrib-
transforming children’s livelihoods in the long uted by the state (Ferguson 2015: 209). In short,
term, by improving their human capital (Fergu- beneficiaries do not become actual owners over
son 2015). From a distributive standpoint, policy real means of life but claimants to an immaterial
makers posit that CCT beneficiaries will grow up and abstract right, the realization of which de-
better educated, healthier, and ready to enter the pends on prevailing political leadership and the
workforce with an entrepreneurial spirit. Over macroeconomic situation.
time, workers will presumably accumulate cash There are two interrelated conditions in the
from wages, which they can subsequently invest background of Ferguson’s reconceptualization
in external goods, such as houses, land, or other of the first clause. The first background condi-
sites and means of (re)production. The story as- tion is the fading specter of “full employment”
sumes numerous conditions, for example, that that formerly made the traditional welfare state
children will find stable, gainful employment in possible through redistribution of income and
adulthood—hardly a given. But assuming that other taxes (Ferguson 2015: 15). However, full
things go according to plan, the time to return employment is not a reality in many locations of
on the investment in a child’s human capital is the global economy (Ferguson 2015: 157). Thus,
a generation. In short, the distributive potential the second clause (“teach a man to fish”) is ren-
of CCTs remains deferred to an “imaginary fu- dered meaningless, as many industries get by
ture” (Dapuez 2017). with fewer and fewer workers (Ferguson 2015:
The previously cited proverb is supposed to 36). CCT programs that rely on augmenting hu-
reveal the manifest superiority of the second man capital are thus increasingly incoherent in
clause, teach a man to fish, which is based on the contemporary global economy.
the timescale: Why feed someone for a day The second background condition is the
when you could feed them for their whole life? “radical deterioration of agrarian livelihoods,”
Ferguson (2015) challenges this conventional- a condition that planners have “come to terms”
ized wisdom and considers the consequences of with against “dreams” of “‘re-agrarianization’”
reimagining the first clause (“give a man a fish”) (Ferguson 2015: 78). The “decisive political de-
as an unconditional, “binding entitlement” feat” with which such dreams were met in pre-
(Ferguson 2015: 38). Under this reconceptual- vious decades, Ferguson adds, made it “too clear
ization, receiving a share is decoupled from the how limited were the possibilities for a rural ‘fix’
fruit of a person’s labor or their institutional sta- to the problems of poverty and unemployment”
tus as “dependent” or “vulnerable.” A person’s (Ferguson 2015: 78). Wherever full industrial
share in the commonweal, rather, is guaranteed employment did not follow from the rural ex-
by the sheer fact of being in society. This univer- odus—as promised by modernization theory
salization of cash transfers, seen in UBI propos- (Ferguson 2015: 192)—a rural livelihood no
als, attends to the needs of all people. longer appears as a viable alternative for the ur-
This shift in the logic of distributive justice ban underclass.
involves a notion of ownership that Ferguson Taken together, these two background con-
calls the “rightful share,” analogous to dividends ditions mean that, in many parts of the world,
periodically received by corporate sharehold- receiving one’s proverbial piece of the pie can-
ers (Ferguson 2015: 51–52). The rightful share not be predicated on participation in the labor
represents a significant advance over the condi- market. Meanwhile, a rural return, or “repeas-
tionalities of CCTs, which are based on scrutiny antization” (van der Ploeg 2009), hardly seems
of a person’s status as deserving because proven to offer a viable alternative. This second condi-
responsible. However, claimants to the rightful tion is perhaps a significant reason why thereA politicized ecology of resilience | 7
has been little longitudinal research on RLR, (re)integrating durable assets into redistributive
whereas research on cash transfers has advanced struggles, as seemingly immaterial social phe-
substantially in recent years—“cash is king,” as nomena—such as “having a voice”—are con-
the expression goes. However, the rural exodus ditioned by manifold (ecological) relationships
is not an inexorable outcome of history but is with external material goods.
rather owed to land grabs and numerous other
historical events that have left many rural com-
munities in ruins. Seeking to restore their ru- External goods: More than
ral livelihoods, the families who occupied the rightful shares
plantations in southern Bahia’s cacao zone offer
a powerful counterpoint to pessimism about a Rural families in southern Bahia are oriented by
rural “fix” to poverty and inequality. notions of ownership that look beyond right-
Moreover, RLRs address a major blind spot in ful shares to cash revenues and toward claims
the capabilities and human capital approaches to durable, external goods such as land and
informing CCT programs. With its primary houses, trees and ponds, and other means of
focus on human capital, both CCTs and the life. Rather than giving people fish or teaching
capabilities approach generally neglect the re- them how to fish, they open toward a third po-
distribution of other goods, such as hard assets sition that democratizes ownership of material
in land, houses, or other durable material re- sites and means of (re)production. People who
sources. Indeed, Nussbaum’s (1990: 231) initial control durable material assets depend less on
“list” of goods encompassed by the capabilities the vicissitudes of wage labor and do not face
approach did not include immovable assets; the same stigma or surveillance involved in
these were later added but remain neglected receiving cash distributions from the state. Re-
(Nussbaum 2003; see Claassen 2015: 222–223). storing their control over the means of life per-
RLRs also advance a fuller concept of “own- mits them to produce without being impelled
ership” than is implied by the rightful share. by market imperatives, meanwhile restoring the
Scholarship in critical feminist economics, in- dignity of labor that is lost on “productivist”
cluding research on women’s land rights in Latin logics of distribution (Ferguson 2015: 44).
America (Deere and León 2001) and India Rural families in southern Bahia are plu-
(Agarwal 1994; Agarwal and Panda 2007), sug- ralists in their distributive politics. In the first
gests that women’s secure control of durable as- years following the land occupations of the
sets (e.g., agricultural land and houses) has more late 1990s, they combined occasional wage la-
enduring consequences for their sense of auton- bor with payments from social programs (pi-
omy than do improved access to education and oneered by former President Cardoso) as they
labor markets alone. Greater material autonomy cultivated agroforests on their occupied lands.
leads to important collateral outcomes for well- These sources of income played transitional
being, such as reduced reports of domestic vio- roles that sustained them as they parted with
lence (Agarwal and Panda 2007). The reason for their status as “landless” people (DeVore 2017b:
this is that women who secure control of ma- 656–662). However, transitional does not mean
terial assets have greater leverage, and a fuller transformative. Gertler et al. (2012) show that
set of “exit” options, in negotiating problematic CCT payments in Mexico permitted beneficia-
domestic relationships, as suggested by Fraser’s ries to increase their assets in the form of small
theory of justice called “participatory parity,” ac- livestock, such as chickens, while expanding
cording to which democratized control of ma- their use of agricultural land. Importantly, how-
terial resources supports the exercise of “voice” ever, study households already owned at least
(Fraser 2001; see DeVore 2015, 2017b). This three hectares of land (Gertler et al. 2012: 171,
field of research indicates the consequences of note 17). While the study showed increased8 | Jonathan DeVore
productive use of assets in land, it did not show against regional leaders of the Landless Work-
that CCTs increase land asset ownership among ers’ Movement (MST), which attempted to stop
those holding no land to begin with. Thus, while their expansion into what, at the time, was one
CCT payments may play important transitional of the region’s most mature remaining stands
roles in actualizing the value of land, cash trans- of Atlantic Forest. As a compromise, the MST
fers are not adequate to realizing aspirations for leadership promised to deliver food baskets to
land ownership—paramount among the exter- these families on an indefinite basis. But the
nal goods valued by rural families in southern families at Sapucaia were unhappy with these
Bahia. restrictions, as they prevented them from culti-
Thus, while rural families in Bahia express vating diversified agroforests that could provide
multitude and variety in their distributive pol- for durability and “independence” in their live-
itics and livelihoods (Figure 2), they can and lihoods—as a mode of “depending rightly” (De-
do draw distinctions among the goods that ad- Vore 2014: 156–158). Living from promises of
vance their struggles for social reconstruction. food baskets amounted to an undesirable form
In a squatter community called Sapucaia, as I of dependency and undermined their struggles
have described elsewhere (DeVore 2016, 2019a: to liberate themselves from their landless status.
199–201), families were compelled to choose The reason for their decision had everything
between plots of land or distributions of food to do with the security and stability that, they
baskets (cestas básicas). These families chose reckoned, attended to these different goods.
land. Their decision, however, pitted them Promises to deliver food baskets were subject to
Figure 2: The multitude and variety of a vegetable garden and fish pond surrounded by agroforest.
Photo by author, 2009.A politicized ecology of resilience | 9
impersonal bureaucratic cuts to state programs cupuaçu [Theobroma grandiflorum]. Last
(Morton 2014), roll cuts by MST leaders who week I harvested a bunch and made about
mediated distributions to community members 100 reais. I bought what I needed and,
(DeVore 2015: 1213), mismanagement, diver- thank God, I have food at home. And I
sion, theft, and what I call “financial extractiv- also have my little cacao orchard that I in-
ism” in social programs (DeVore 2019b). By vested in last year. . . . Thank God it’s pro-
contrast with food baskets, land that people ductive, I’ve already harvested a lot. . . . I
reckoned as their own—rather than land to can sell popsicles or something in my dad’s
which their access was mediated by faceless bu- little country store. I can harvest some fruit
reaucrats or absentee social movement leaders— pulp and sell it. And we can get by.
represented a transformative and more durable
solution to the hardships they faced. Rural land Highlighting the multitude and variety available
reform beneficiaries in southern Bahia are thus through her family’s land, Juliana then focused
attentive to the durability and defeasibility of on the hardships faced by other municipal em-
different goods that can foster wellbeing. Their ployees who lived solely from their wages:
struggles to secure land have enabled them to
depart the world of plantation labor and endure But many people only had those [jobs]
layoffs, price hikes, roll cuts, and budget cuts to to live from. They live in town, and you
social programs. know that those who live in town have to
In moments of crisis, these families are able pay for everything. Those of us who live in
to creatively reallocate land and labor to fulfill the countryside, we have this advantage,
different needs and desires and meet different because here we can find bananas, we can
challenges as they arise. A woman named Juli- find cassava, we can find a pumpkin. We
ana, a settler at an MST community called Casa can plant some beans, plant some manioc,
Nova, illustrated this point in an August 2019 and later harvest it to make some manioc
interview, when she lost her job at a rural medi- flour [farinha]. But, Jon, what about those
cal post after the local government laid off doz- who can’t? Really, it’s very sad. A lot of
ens of municipal workers. The cuts came with people were suddenly fired, many people.
only a few days’ notice as families suddenly lost
their main sources of income. Juliana, however, As a result of RLR, and in the face of budget cuts
was able to turn to the family’s land: and layoffs, Juliana and others in her MST com-
munity were able to rebound in ways that those
Thank God we have the little farm. Many who depended on wage labor—and those who
don’t have land and depended on their paid rent for dwelling space—could not.
jobs to put food on the table and pay rent.
The big thing is paying rent. Many people
are despondent, not knowing what to do, COVID-19 in southern Bahia
since they depend on that money alone.
And worst of all, the municipal govern- The first COVID-19 case in Bahia was confirmed
ment didn’t tell anyone in advance. on March 6, 2020. Municipal governments in
southern Bahia quickly closed local commerce.
She then reflected on the significance of her By April, a settler at Casa Nova named Abelino
family’s land: reported that “everybody’s at a standstill, no-
body can go anywhere. All of the businesses are
But I’m thankful to God, because we have closed, everything.” A young man named Sil-
land from which we can get our daily vano, from Nossa Senhora, explained that peo-
bread. I thank God that I’m harvesting my ple in neighboring towns across the region—10 | Jonathan DeVore
Camamu, Piraí do Norte, and Gandu—began gram deployed Bolsa Família’s bureaucratic in-
mounting barriers to block road traffic com- frastructure to distribute payments, as has been
ing from larger nearby cities, such as Ilhéus or done during other emergencies in Brazil (Paiva et
Itabuna. Local MST communities banned itin- al. 2020). However, Bolsa Família has been under
erant vendors from selling personal protective sustained attack since former President Michel
equipment within their communities. Rural Temer’s administration, which in 2017 enacted
transportation was reduced to a single route the single largest roll cut in the program’s his-
that went into town each morning and returned tory, affecting 543,000 families.4 As late as March
at noon. 2020, Bolsonaro proceeded with roll cuts that af-
For the region’s landless laborers, opportuni- fected 158,000 Bolsa Família beneficiaries.5
ties for work on local plantations were threat- Perhaps more importantly, Bolsonaro’s ad-
ened by the pandemic, as falling commodity ministration has been slow to approve bene-
prices for rubber and cacao negatively affected fits for new families. Whereas 264,159 families
local markets. Early in the pandemic, local were added to the rolls in May 2019, the num-
rubber-buying firms temporarily stopped pur- ber of new families dropped to 2,542 after June
chasing rubber harvests, which negatively af- 2019; by February 2020, there was a backlog
fected large- and small-scale rubber producers, of 1.5 million families waiting for the approval
including families in local RLR communities. of Bolsa Família benefits.6 This administrative
“Rubber is practically at a standstill,” Juliana foot-dragging may have exacerbated difficulties
explained in May 2020, “they’re practically not faced by families seeking access to EA payments
buying.” Cacao prices were also low, as Abelino early in the pandemic, as Juliana explained:
explained: “Cacao was at 205 reais per arroba
[15 kilograms], now it’s dropped to 150, 155. People who were not already registered
The dollar plummeted, so things continue to get in the Single Registry (Cadastro Único)
worse, as there are no exports.” At Nossa Sen- system experienced numerous problems
hora, meanwhile, Joana complained that there with the telephone app. . . . For those who
are very few buyers for her cupuaçu harvests: have bank accounts it’s easy, since there’s
“The cupuaçu harvest has arrived, and there’s no direct deposit into the account. But there
way to sell—it’s difficult, the prices are cheap. . . . are people who don’t have accounts, so
There’s nobody to sell to.” they open a digital account. But many of
them still aren’t able to withdraw or make
transfers. . . . The app is just too congested.
Emergency aid payments
Not only was app traffic congested, but so too
By March 2020, several dozen countries were were lines in local administrative offices, she
already deploying some form of cash transfer as continued:
part of their pandemic response (Gentilini et al.
2020). In Brazil, economic research suggested Before the emergency assistance, people
that the poorest sectors of society had lost nearly were staying at home. But after the assis-
half of their income. By April 2020, the Brazil- tance was approved, people are mostly in
ian federal government approved the first EA the agencies. . . . There are a lot of people,
payments to informal, unemployed, and self- a lot of people sleeping in line. After the
employed workers. Payments from April to emergency payments, the number of con-
August were 600 reais per adult (or 1200 per firmed [COVID-19] cases went up in the
household), whereas payments were cut by half cities, especially in peripheral neighbor-
from September through December, to 300 reais hoods among people with weak financial
per adult (or 600 per household). The EA pro- situations.A politicized ecology of resilience | 11
Securing access to EA payments thus became a with the exception of disinfectants. Abelino
potentially lethal exercise, as people were forced explained:
to cluster together in long lines for extended pe-
riods of time. For now, the [grocery] shelves are still
For those who were able to access EA pay- full, there’s no lack of food at the mo-
ments, the benefits are more universal than Bolsa ment. However, the prices are rising every
Família, Silvano explained, targeting a wider day. You see one price today, tomorrow
range of people, such as his aging uncle, who it’s another price. The prices are what’s
lives alone and works as a sharecropper. While bad. Agricultural products [produtos] are
the payments may be adequate to support ru- plummeting, and consumer goods [mer-
ral laborers like Silvano’s uncle, there are limits cadoria] rising. I think the [merchants]
for those who lived in towns and cities, as Ju- are taking advantage of the situation, re-
liana explained: “It’s enough for food. But [not ally sticking it to the consumers.
for] those who pay rent, who have water bills,
electricity bills, and medicine—the assistance Juliana elaborated:
is only enough for food.” For the landless and
the propertyless, EA payments thus helped to Before, beans were 5 reais [per kilo], today
ensure that any other income went directly to they’re almost 10. And dry steak [jabá]
their landlords. was 18 reais [per kilo], today the lowest
quality is 27 reais and the better quality
32. We used to buy beef at 10 to 12 reais
Destruction of buying power [per kilo], and today it’s between 20 to 22
reais for the lowest quality. . . . The prices
Whatever the redistributive potential of EA pay- for goods are exorbitant. Everything’s up,
ments, the buying power of that money has been beans, rice, all of these things, greens,
rapidly demolished by inflation and price goug- vegetables, these things have really gone
ing, including for food prices. Some reports sug- up. You used to get a cesta básica for 100,
gest that prices for numerous foods have risen, 130 reais—now one cesta is already 200
“such as onions (30.08 percent), potatoes (16.39 reais. . . . Those who used to buy a lot now
percent), carioca beans (8.66 percent) and meat buy less, so there’s less food in the home.
(0.05 percent)” (Editorial 2020, my translation). [The merchants] are taking advantage of
Locally reported price increases, collected in things.
June 2020, appear substantially greater than
these national averages (Figure 3). Others reported on rising prices for other goods.
Despite news reports warning of food short- Anabel, who lived in town, explained: “One thing
ages, few people reported empty store shelves, that’s really gone up is medicine; medicines are
more expensive.”
Diminished income, including reduced rev-
enue from the sale of agricultural products, was
thus exacerbated by rising prices for food, med-
icine, and other goods. The purchasing power of
EA payments diminishes in inverse proportion
to these price increases. Meanwhile, predatory
merchants who control the flow of consumer
Figure 3. Price increases for select food and goods can effectively direct EA payments into
household items in June 2020.7 their own pockets.12 | Jonathan DeVore
Resilience of a reconstituted peasantry Last week, we made three [50 kilogram]
bags of manioc flour. So, we have manioc
Unlike cash transfers, the productive capacity flour. We only go to Ituberá to buy a cesta
of land held by RLR beneficiaries is not dimin- básica and some meat, so we can avoid
ished by the value-destroying market processes going into town for a while. . . . We have
that affect prices of consumer goods and agri- corn planted, we have beans, so we can get
cultural commodities. Abelino explained: by for a while. Our grandson has his little
banana grove [roçinha]. So, we can eat ba-
Things are easier for us here because we nanas. That’s how we’re living.
have pupunha nuts and heart of palm
[palmito]. We’ve got cassava, we’ve got Juliana summarized the fate of RLR beneficia-
manioc. You plant a little pigeon pea bush, ries vis-à-vis the region’s landless and property-
a few mangalô beans, some pinto beans, less families: “Those who still have their farms
some corn. . . . You raise some chickens, [lavoura], their small properties, they’re able
raise a pig. And you keep going. But those to get by doing one thing or another. But those
living in the city, the burden is too much. who live in town, they only get by on Jesus’s
. . . Things are hard to come by for those mercy.”
who live in the city. Sometimes you have
to beg [pedir] for money just to buy some-
thing. But it’s easier for us here—we have Conclusion
pineapples, we have oranges, we have a
bunch of things. We save a lot because we In this contribution, I have gestured toward a
don’t have to spend money. But in the city, politicized concept of resilience that, by con-
the situation is severe. trast with some (depoliticized, regressive) for-
mulations of resilience, centers transforma-
Abelino’s point is that RLR beneficiaries in tive struggles to redistribute material means of
southern Bahia are able to decouple aspects (re)production. Owed to earlier struggles for
of their agricultural production from the vi- RLR, rural families living in southern Bahia
cissitudes of regional commodity markets and appear more resilient in the face of numerous
cash economies. Importantly, several of the systemic “stressors,” including global pandem-
crops Abelino describes—heart of palm, man- ics, regime change, budget and roll cuts, layoffs,
ioc, pineapples, oranges, and many others not price inflation, and price gouging. There are
listed—are cash crops that can be eaten rather three key reasons for their resilience: (1) they are
than sold, when necessary. Moreover, families engaged in diversified livelihood strategies that
in these communities engage in diversified ag- do not solely rely on wages or markets; (2) they
ricultural production; they either own or do not do not pay rents for land or housing; and (3)
pay rent on their land and are not trapped in de-commodified land is decoupled from value-
cycles of debt. Together, these factors mean that destroying market processes to which cash is
“the market” does not exert the same coercive subject.
power over these families, which it might exert Cash transfers, such as CCT and EA pay-
over farm families elsewhere, such as contract ments in Brazil, will remain indispensable so
farmers who take external financing to produce long as most people do not control means of
restricted sets of agricultural products. (re)production, such as land and houses. For
Other RLR beneficiaries elaborated on other the landless and the propertyless facing the
ways that local families were preparing for the pandemic, EA payments—stated most cyni-
pandemic. Joana explained: cally—serve the class interests of landlords andA politicized ecology of resilience | 13
predatory merchants, either by helping them Piperata, James C. Scott, Alain El Youssef,
pay rent or purchase overpriced food. CCT pay- Charles Zuckerman, and two anonymous re-
ments, for their part, certainly keep people from viewers all contributed to ideas developed in
the brink of hunger and lead to clear improve- this article. I am grateful to them all.
ments in health and education. But short-term
gains from CCTs are precarious, while long-
term gains from human capital may not be real-
Jonathan DeVore is Visiting Assistant Profes-
izable in contemporary labor markets.
sor in Anthropology at the University of Lou-
These different redistributive programs in-
isiana at Lafayette, USA. Jonathan received his
volve competing notions of distributive justice
PhD from the University of Michigan in 2014
informed by different background theories of
and has held postdoctoral research and teach-
the good. CCTs maintain a self-ward focus on
ing positions at Yale University, the University
human capital, which is supposed to help (im-
of Bonn, the University of Cologne, and Miami
proved) wage laborers purchase whatever exter-
University. Jonathan has been conducting re-
nal goods they may need to live in the deferred,
search on land rights movements in southern
imaginary future. Ferguson’s (2015) concept of
Bahia since 2002 and is completing his first
the rightful share represents an important ad-
book on this research.
vance in the logic of distributive justice, as it in-
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1944-7203
volves a social concept of shareholdership that
Email: jonathan.devore@louisiana.edu
informs UBI proposals—anticipated in Brazil’s
EA payments. RLRs escalate the scope of share-
ownership by seeking to democratize ownership
of material sites and means of (re)production Notes
and are informed by an ecological background
theory of ethical life, according to which human 1. http://www.incra.gov.br/pt/reforma-agraria
wellbeing is constituted in and through rela- .html (accessed August 12, 2020).
tions with manifold external goods. While cash 2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bean-shortage-
adds-insult-to-injury-for-beleaguered-brazilia
remains king in the first two approaches to dis-
ns-1467655733 (accessed March 1, 2021).
tributive politics, cash exhibits numerous forms 3. For incipient reflections on “complete” or “com-
of defeasibility to which hard assets like land are plex” goods, see “Part II: Social Goods” in De-
not subject, which makes land—at least from Vore (2014).
the perspective of rural families in southern 4. https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultim
Bahia—more secure ground on which to build as-noticias/2017/08/11/bolsa-familia-reduz-
their lives and livelihoods, especially in the face 543-mil-beneficios-em-1-mes-programa-tem-
of various crises. maior-corte-da-historia.htm (accessed March
1, 2021).
5. https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultim
Acknowledgments as-noticias/2020/03/20/governo-corta-158-
mil-do-bolsa-familia-em-meio-ao-covid-19-
61-sao-do-ne.htm (accessed March 1, 2021).
I would like to express my deepest thanks to
6. https://noticias.uol.com.br/ultimas-noticias/
friends and family in southern Bahia who have agencia-estado/2020/02/19/bolsa-familia-ja-te
taught me so much over the years. Maria Elisa m-fila-de-35-milhoes-de-pessoas.htm (accessed
Balen, William DeVore, James Ferguson, Kevin March 1, 2021).
M. Flesher, Márcia Maria Guimarães Flesher, 7. Respondents were asked to report on prices in
Martin Fotta, Webb Keane, Gregory Duff Mor- June 2020 and on prices they recalled for the
ton, Patrick Neveling, Susan Paulson, Barbara same goods prior to the pandemic.14 | Jonathan DeVore
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