May 28, 2025 — Assistant Professor Matthew Abel has been selected for a 2025-2026 Fulbright US Scholar Award to Brazil. For his project, “Brazil’s Northern Arc: Transnational Grain Trading and the Forest’s New Fate,” Abel will give public lectures at the Federal University of Pará (Universidade Federal do Pará – UFPA) in the eastern Amazonian city of Belém while conducting research on recent investments in bulk grain trading in the eastern Amazon and their implications for conservation and international climate policy. Between September and December 2025, he will collaborate with the anthropologist Dr. Katiane Silva and other researchers at UFPA’s Institute of Philosophy and the Human Sciences while conducting ethnographic interviews at one of the largest industrial export poles in the eastern Amazon. He will also help organize outreach events related to the thirtieth annual UN Climate Change Conference, which will take place in Belém in November.
Brazil is one of the five largest agricultural exporters in the world and competes directly with the United States in global markets for bulk grains and livestock feed. In the 1990s and 2000s, the expansion of industrial farming methods throughout the country’s central-western agricultural belt fueled growth in the national agribusiness sector. Despite its rapid ascendance as a global agricultural powerhouse, however, Brazil has also sought to maintain its position as an important player in the international environmental movement and leader in climate policy negotiations. Brazil is home to approximately 60% of the Amazon rainforest, and in 1992 hosted one of the most important international environmental governance efforts of the twentieth century: the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. This was the meeting where world leaders laid out the basic framework for international climate negotiations, known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Proponents of the “Northern Arc”–a development scheme and the focus of Abel’s research–contend that, like the Mississippi in the US, the Amazon is well-suited for redevelopment as an agricultural export hub that will refocus development attention away from environmentally destructive roadways towards less carbon-intensive forms of river transport. However, environmentalists argue exactly the opposite–that the Northern Arc has incentivized land speculation, catalyzing a new cycle of frontier development with potentially catastrophic outcomes for the region.
The Fulbright Program is a cultural exchange program that supports international research and education. SMU’s Department of Anthropology’s other recent recipients include Kelly McKowen (Norway, 2023-2024) and Maryann R. Cairns (North Macedonia, 2020-2021).