By the AGENTS project team.
Between 19 and 31 October, members of the AGENTS team visited the Brazilian state of Acre to meet potential partners for the project’s co-production process. Acre is known internationally as the home of a rubber tappers’ union that built a forest conservation and social justice movement under the leadership of Chico Mendes during the 1970s and 1980s. The team met with unions, government officials, indigenous leaders, extractivist cooperatives, researchers and NGOs who provided invaluable perspectives for the next steps of the project. A highlight of the visit was witnessing diverse agroforestry systems which support both local livelihoods and ecological restoration. The team plans to return to Acre in 2020 to begin in-depth research into a selection of initiatives representing different potentially transformative models for tropical forest landscapes.
From 6 to 16 December this year, the AGENTS team will visit the Santarém region in the Brazilian state of Pará to conduct a dialogue workshop and fieldwork. The dialogue workshop will take place in on 12 Dec and will include stakeholders from local and regional organizations in the Lower Amazon and Xingu River Basin, such as grassroots organizations and social movements, non-governmental organizations, universities and research centres, as well as rural producers. Through the dialogue workshop, we will introduce the AGENTS Project to regional actors, get feedback regarding the project’s overall strategy, collectively build a list of ‘promising initiatives’, and explore possible forms of collaboration. In addition, fieldwork will be carried out by the AGENTS team in the surrounding region, taking a bottom-up approach to identify initiatives promoting pathways to sustainability, such as local governance arrangements, small-scale organic farming, agroforestry and forest management of timber and non-timber products.