Transforming power in Amazonian extractivism: historical exploitation, contemporary "fair trade", and new possibilities for indigenous cooperatives and conservation

BurkeTransforming power in Amazonian extractivism Journal of Political EcologyVol. 19, 2012126Cooperatives have been widely supported as vehicles for community-based conservation and development.However, these organizations are often developed around specific income-generating projects rather thanbroader considerations of how relations of power and ecological exploitation might be transformed. Thisarticle uses the case of AmazonCoop—a cooperative dedicated to the supposedly fair trade of Brazil nutsbetween Amazonian indigenous people and the multinational corporation The Body Shop—to illustrate howhistorical political ecology might facilitate the design of more radically transformative cooperatives.Contextualizing AmazonCoop within the history of Amazonian extractivism, and particularly the extractionof wild rubber, reveals the specific mechanisms and processes through which indigenous people have gainedand lost power. This analysis thus creates opportunities for thinking more creatively about how contemporaryconservation–development schemes might pursue ecologically sustainable and socially just socialtransformations.