“SO LET'S WORK TOGETHER TO IMPROVE PRODUCTION”: WOMEN, AGROECOLOGY, AND TERRITORY IN NORTHEASTERN PARÁ

Abstract

This paper presents the results of research conducted with peasant communities in the Lower Tocantins region, in the northeastern mesoregion of Pará, between 2018 and 2022. An ethnographic approach informed primarily by studies in the field of decolonial political ecology allowed us to identify processes of mobilization and local action led by women within an agroecological production collective emerging from a broader territorial dynamic. Contrary to the teachings of neo-extractivist developmentalism, from which we critique, the examination of empirical references demonstrated that women's investments in an agroecological option, on the one hand, update the combative nature of a peasantry that reinvents itself in the production of new social subjects and its influence in the public arena. On the other, they reframe the pedagogical dimension of the movements in the territorial public action they articulate, revealing them as educational subjects of peasant re-existence. Nevertheless, such dynamics still require a sensitive look at new environmentalization exercises and the collective learning that it provides in a context marked by disputes and coexistence of rationalities.