Resiliência e sustentabilidade de um projeto de assentamento agroextrativista do baixo Tocantins, Pará.

Abstract

In the Amazon, the historiography produced punctuates decisive moments of ruptures and engendering new relations between society and the environment in the region. From naturalists to Agroextractive Settlement Projects, the population has been experiencing development cycles, which, in certain situations, have changed the environment. The study aimed to assess environmental changes and levels of socio-environmental resilience and sustainability in the region of Baixo Tocantins, Pará. Methodological procedures included document analysis in laws and historical records, scientific articles; and field expeditions with the application of ethnographic techniques (participant observation, semi-structured interviews and photographic records). The subjects involved in the research were community leaders and residents living in the area demarcated by the PAE São João Batista, in Abaetetuba, who were selected by probabilistic sampling of the simple random type, totaling 141 residents interviewed. In the resilience approach, the adaptive cycle materialized as one of the reference points and for the investigation of sustainability, the condition of sustainability was calculated from the perception of the riverside dwellers about the social, economic and environmental conditions experienced in the settlement. The naturalists' descriptions of Baixo Tocantins are dotted with the multiple beauties of this region, the grandeur of the river, the sublimity of its forests and numerous products, such as sugar cane and açaí. The transition of the Cana-Açaí economic system in the PAE São João Batista, has enabled the riverside residents to experience changes and create conditions to reorganize themselves as a settlement, so that the growth of the açaí fruit market marks the community's resilience point. On the other hand, the residents' perceptions about changes in the environment, from the implementation of the PAE and the subsequent intensification of açaí cultivation, indicate limitations related to changes in fauna (5.7%) and climate (39.9%), silting (1.3%), deforestation (5.1%), erosion (4.4%), river pollution (8.2%), fires (0.6%) and solid waste (34.8%). According to community members, the settlement has a very low level of community sustainability. The difficulties reported by them reflect the contradictions and challenges already pointed out for the Amazon region, showing that the sustainability of socio-ecological systems is more dependent on variables external to the local productive systems than it would appear to be in a first approach. The settlers live in a dynamic of construction and reconstruction, as they are not isolated to the point that they are not affected by capitalist logic and are in conflict with their traditional way of life.