Merchants of the north: Infrastructure and indebtedness along Brazil's Amazon estuary

Matthew Abel

Economic Anthropology, 2022, vol. 9, issue 2, 349-360

Abstract: Drawing on fieldwork with riverine householders in the Amazonian municipality of Abaetetuba, this article recounts an ongoing struggle against the construction of a fluvial grain terminal by Cargill, the global grain‐trading giant. Over the past two decades, grain‐trading firms have engaged in a publicly subsidized bidding war to expand export infrastructure in the Amazon, harnessing the world's largest river system to flush agricultural commodities on the global market. The so‐called Northern Arc consists of a regional network of private grain terminals, ports, roads, and railways connecting disparate places within a broader landscape of value. This article overlays ethnography with historical analysis to examine the confrontation between a regional project of commodity chain integration and a set of valuations derived from the long‐standing role of commodity exchange in the Amazon. I suggest that the Northern Arc articulates with the sociological legacy of the aviamento: a system of debt‐peonage that structured the circulation of commodities in the basin during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By connecting local understandings of power, circulation, and authority to a new structural position within the global food system, the Northern Arc has galvanized old antagonisms and reflects the history of social conflict along the Amazon estuary.

Date: 2022
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