Neoliberal Ecopolitics and Indigenous Peoples: The Kayapo, The “Rainforest Harvest,” and The Body Shop

Even though the “Trade Not Aid” program undertaken by The Body Shop in Kayapo communities has been touted as the realization of the “Rainforest Harvest” approach to conservation, it is in fact a wage labor relationship whereby the Kayapo are not compensated for the real product they provide The Body Shop: their photographic image. Furthermore, this program is but one part of a portfolio of income sources available to the Kayapo, and does not prevent them from engaging in environmentally exploitative contracts with loggers and miners, and so should not be seen as an exclusive alternative to environmentally damaging land use practices. The Kayapo, an Indigenous nation inhabiting the southern fringes of the Amazon forest in central Brazil, have gained global renown for their aggressive, politically astute, and amazingly successful defense of their traditional homeland from invading settlers, land speculators, miners, and government developers. Over the past two decades they have made themselves a successful test case of the ability of an Indigenous Amazonian society to defend its territory, operate effectively in the national and international political arena, and selectively adopt modern technologies such as video and telemedia without sacrificing its essential cultural autonomy. Recently, the Kayapo have become a test case for another major issue for contemporary ecological and Indigenous advocates: the effectiveness of the commercial marketing of forest products as a strategy for saving the forest and its native inhabitants from destruction and dispossession by development. This approach, a synthesis of free-market liberalism with activism in defense of the environment and the survival of Indigenous cultures and forest peoples, has been baptized the “Rainforest Harvest” by its main theoretician and most prominent practitioner, Jason Clay, until recently the director of Cultural Survival Enterprises. The basic idea of the “Harvest” approach is that demonstrating that rainforest ecosystems can be economically productive, by getting Indigenous communities and other forest dwellers involved in sustainable kinds of production of marketable forest products, is the only realistic way of saving them from economically motivated destruction by settlers, ranchers, loggers and miners. Making the ecosystem yield a profit, proponents of this approach argue, is in the long run a more effective and reliable way of saving it than conventional approaches relying on aid and political protection from gov 