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Squeezed-out Amazon smallholders seek new frontiers in Brazil’s Roraima state

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CAROEBE, Brazil — Onésio Nascimento has worked the land his whole life, moving from one Brazilian farming frontier to the next. During the coronavirus pandemic, he sold 20 hectares (50 acres) of land in northwest Mato Grosso state and used the money to buy 100 hectares (250 acres), more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) deeper north into the Amazon, in south Roraima state. Today, he grows cassava and bananas on his land, an hour’s drive down a bumpy dirt road, flanked by small herds of cattle, which turns to mud during the rainy season and that loggers use to extract valuable Amazon hardwoods from nearby pristine forest. On a late October afternoon, during the severe 2023 Amazon drought, his patch of land sat burning; he’d set it on fire deliberately so he could clear space to plant more crops. “There was nothing when I arrived, it was all forest,” he told Mongabay. “We had to work a lot.” Even in this far-flung part of the Amazon, 59-year-old Nascimento isn’t alone as an “outsider.” Almost all of his neighbors on dirt road 34, in the banana and timber town of Caroebe, migrated from other Amazon states such as Mato Grosso, Rondônia and Pará, attracted by cheap land. Dirt road 34, in Caroebe, south Roraima, turns to mud during the rainy season and is used by loggers to extract valuable Amazon hardwoods from nearby pristine forest. Image by Avener Prado for Mongabay. In recent years, infrastructure megaprojects, large-scale cattle farming operations and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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