Peasant mining production as a development strategy: the case of women in gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon.

The purpose of this research is to establish the grounds for a critical social scientific analysis of mineral development based upon the case study of women in informal peasant gold mining or garimpagem1 in the Brazilian Amazon. Situated at the local/regional level of analysis, this case study illustrates the main tensions of contemporary mineral development. First, the region’s mineral development paths appear as a result of the application of liberal and neo-liberal economic policies of modernization and liberalization of primary export sectors and later on import substituting industrialization. Significant examples are the Primeiro Plano de Desenvolvimento Nacional and the Segundo Plano de Desenvolvimento Nacional, which created agro-mineral growth poles to alleviate the domestic economic problems triggered by the international oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. In the second place, intersecting and conflictive discourses of local, national and international mineral development drive regional production. Nationally owned mining companies, subsidiaries of multinational corporations, and formal and informal small-scale mining enterprises fight against each other for legitimate ‘rights’ over land management and mineral extraction. Although the recently privatized Companhia Vale do Rio Doce and its main subsidiary DOCEGEO lead regional gold production, they compete with major multinational corporations such as Canadian Barrick Gold Corporation and South African Anglo Gold. Third, historically dispossessed female peasantry of North, Centre, South Eastern Amazon and North East Brazil, compete against national and multinational mining firms in the extraction of minerals, mainly gold and semi-precious stones. These three factors shape particular mining dynamics in a geographic context already affected by bifurcated development policies directed at safeguarding national sovereignty and securing federal control over the natural resources. From the problematic entwine of the operations of corporatist mining capital and peasant small-scale mining, oppositional forms of organization of production surface embodied in women’s labour and management of forest resources. The locally focused oppositional forms of mineral production, particularly the forms of women’s labour and peasant technologies associated with mineral extraction, make the examination of this case study an imperative task for contemporary development studies.