“We produce to eat the surplus we sell...”: agroecology network(s) as territorial public action in the brazilian amazon

Abstract

This text discusses lessons learned and contradictions of an “agroecological option” as a territorial public action in Baixo Tocantins, a mesoregion in the northeast of Pará. The empirical reference analysis, supported by contributions from a decolonial political ecology, revealed an important exercise of mobilization and politicization in the collective action triggered by peasants as a socio-environmental management strategy in defense of their living territories. The Jirau Agroecology Network, the object of this analysis, synthesizes a process of advocacy in the public arena whose effect points to the possibility of renewing the mechanisms of sociopolitical participation and territorial governance. In effect, it is a dynamic that largely conforms to the development paradigm, although it questions it.