The African oil palm in Bahia, Brazil: Past, present, and potential of an Afro-Brazilian landscape

In 1991, the Secretary of Culture in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia officially designated an eighty-kilometer strip of its Atlantic shores as the Costa do Dendê, or Palm Oil Coast, in a formal nod to the dense stands of African oil palms that had come to dominate local landscapes. Part of a broader initiative to promote tourism, the move branded the region as the main source of Bahian palm oil—long a fundamental material component of vibrant Afro-Brazilian culinary and religious cultures practiced throughout the country. Culminating at least five centuries of transatlantic social, economic, and ecological development, Bahia’s African oil palm groves emerged as a veritable Afro-Brazilian landscape.

A subspontaneous grove of African oil palms at the foot an intertidal mangrove forest in the Pau d’Oleo district of Igrapiuna, Bahia. Photo by Case Watkins.

Elsewhere in the humid tropics, especially Indonesia and Malaysia, plantation monocultures of African oil palms increasingly draw the ire of researchers, environmentalists, and consumers over concerns for deforestation and the erosion of biodiversity. In contrast, Bahia’s African oil palm landscapes remain much more complex, comprised of fluid mosaics of polycultural farms, productive secondary and agroforests, semi-wild (or subspontaneous) groves, and relatively small but expanding monocultures. How did this complex Afro-Brazilian landscape develop? How are current development interventions reshaping that landscape? And how can that landscape inform global oil palm development?

Early development

Bahia’s African oil palm landscapes date back to the seventeenth century (or perhaps earlier) when an English privateer recorded the palm growing in abundance there. Just as in its native western Africa, the salt-tolerant palm thrived in intertidal soils tucked in just behind coastal mangrove forests where birds, mammals, rodents, and people all enjoyed its fruit and in the process dispersed its seeds. The palm moved inland as a key component of polycultural farms in coastal Bahia. Portuguese royal decrees reserved that region for the production of manioc, the staple crop crucial for the colony’s survival.

Indeed, Bahia’s Southern Coast became Brazil’s breadbasket, but rather than simple monocultures, farmers integrated a range of food crops into complex agroecologies, diversifying production while enhancing food security. When clearing and maintaining fields, farmers often spared the most productive African oil palms, managing them above manioc and other crops, mirroring agroecological systems developed millennia prior on yam, taro, rice, and other farms in western Africa. When such African and later Bahian farms went fallow, the fast-growing oil palms would quickly proliferate, leading in many cases to subspontaneous groves that farmers managed and harvested for oils. African oil palms thus became key components of Southern Bahia’s complex landscapes, complementing mixed polycultures of manioc, cacau, beans, rice, okra, and many other food crops and fruit trees.

A managed subspontaneous grove of African oil palms and other species on the Dendê Coast, Sarapui district of Valença, Bahia. Photo by Case Watkins.

Modern development

Local farmers and oil processors continued to develop Bahia’s palm oil economy through the mid-twentieth century with only minimal input from public officials or agricultural elites. That began to change in the 1940s and 50s as international pressure and internal interest finally sparked the beginnings of agroindustrial development in Bahia’s palm oil sector. Using federal subsidies, a subsidiary of Brazil’s national steel company acquired a palm oil processing plant on the Bahian Coast and immediately began planting monocultures and purchasing fresh palm fruit from local farmers. Together, those initiatives encouraged more intensive management, planting, and production of oil palms by small holders. Rather than a simple conversion to monocultures, as elites had planned, the initial wave of modernization represented just the latest in a long series of inputs into a complex agroecological system. Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian landscape was by then a complex, fluid mosaic of polycultures, secondary and agroforests, subspontaneous groves, and a few monocultures variously managed and exploited by humans and other beings. In 2001, according to the state’s Secretary of Agriculture, sub-spontaneous or uncultivated palms accounted for 63 percent of Bahia’s African oil palm landscapes in active production, and small-scale processors generated an estimated 31 percent of the state’s palm oil despite limited resources, credit, and support.

The Afro-Brazilian landscape and the future of palm oil development

Many officials continue to see Bahia’s complex landscape as a quaint anachronism desperately in need of modernization. Their programs pressure farmers to replace polycultures and subspontaneous groves with monocultures in the image of Southeast Asian plantations, even as criticism of those agroindustrial systems continues to mount. Instead of reducing Bahia’s complex landscapes to monoculture and discounting centuries of agroecological knowledge developed there, what if development agents combined the wisdom of local farmers and landscapes with other empirically-tested agroecological principles?

Intercroppings of African oil palm, manioc, beans, and bananas amidst a subspontaneous palm grove in the Sarapuí district of Valença, Bahia. Photo by Case Watkins.

There is already some momentum in that direction. Recent studies in the Amazon conducted by agronomists with EMBRAPA, Brazil’s federal agricultural science agency, have shown economic and ecological benefits of intercropping manioc and African oil palm, recalling the traditional systems first developed in Bahia. Ongoing experiments led by researchers with the World Agroforestry Centre, also in the Amazon, are demonstrating economic, social, and ecological value in oil palm agroforestry systems that integrate up to 17 other species. Unfortunately, despite centuries of development and refinement, African oil palm landscapes in Bahia have received only limited attention, even as those studies in the Amazon suggest Bahia’s traditional knowledges may offer useful insights for resolving socioecological conflict in the rapidly expanding and contentious global palm oil economy. In that way, Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian landscape offers not only a window into our diverse and collective past, but quite possibly a path to a more sustainable future.

Read more

African Oil Palms, Colonial Socioecological Transformation and the Making of an Afro-Brazilian Landscape in Bahia, Brazil

Case Watkins is a PhD candidate in geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University. He has conducted fieldwork and other research on Bahia’s African oil palm landscapes, cultures, and economies since 2008 and is completing his dissertation, expected in late 2015.