Coffee Labor Regimes and Deforestation on a Brazilian Frontier, 1915-1965

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Coffee Labor Regimes and Deforestation on a Brazilian Frontier, 1915-1965Author(s): Christian BrannstromSource: Economic Geography, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Oct., 2000), pp. 326-346Published by: Clark UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/144390 .

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Coffee Labor Regimes and Deforestation on a Brazilian Frontier, 1915-1965*

Christian Brannstrom Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London,

London WC1H 9HA, United Kingdom christian. brannstrom@sas. ac.uk

Abstract: In this paper I analyze the relationship between coffee labor relations and deforestation in Sao Paulo state, Brazil, using new empirical data from judicial archives and a microeconomic approach stressing transaction costs. Contractual planting, sharecropping, and mixed wage-piece rate schemes encouraged rapid conversion of forest and woodland (Cerradao) to coffee by a wide range of landowners. Factors of labor quality, costly supervision, information asymmetries, and risk shaped the labor relations that speeded the creation of coffee groves. Tensions existed within labor relations schemes regarding usufruct, debt, and the definition of work. The findings suggest that greater attention should be given to the particular nature of labor arrangements in affecting environmental resource use.

Key words: coffee, labor relations, deforestation, Brazil.

Nothing is so sublime-and nothing pardons our Paulista [Sao Paulo state] pride so well- as the sea of coffee trees in rows, placed to substitute the native forest... But the golden tree only produces at the expense of the blood of the land. The production of the red pulp is exuberant, but insatiable of humus. An octopus with millions of tentacles, coffee rolls over the forest and makes it vanish.

-Monteiro Lobato 1961 [1920], 4-5

* Research was funded by the Organization of American States (PRA No. F44890); the National Science Foundation (Geography and Regional Science Program, Dissertation Improvement Grant No. SBR-9508433); Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society (Grant-in- Aid of Research); and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School (Foreign Travel Grant). For research logistics I am grate- ful to Hugo de Souza Dias (Centro de Desenvolvimento do Vale do Paranapanema), Patricia Barbosa Fazano (Cons6rcio Intermunicipal do Escrit6rio da Regiao de Governo de Assis), Marlene Aparecida de Souza Gasque (Centro de Documentacao e Apoio a Pesquisa in Assis), and Ant6nio Manoel dos Santos Oliveira. I also thank W. E. Jepson and four anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Brazilian writer Jose Bento Monteiro Lobato saw much to support his 1920

description of the "green wave" of coffee.

Fifty years earlier Sao Paulo state had a

population of 830,000, with 139 kilometers of railroads and 60,000 coffee trees. In 1920 the state's population had grown to 4.6 million, its railroads traversed 6,600 kilometers, and the state's 844 million coffee trees produced 65 percent of Brazil's harvest (at the time, Brazil accounted for 70 percent of world production) (Matton 1973, 286; Martins and Johnston 1992, 308, 314). Production had reached frightening heights in areas once covered by forest and Cerraddo in Sao Paulo state, as Ribeirao Preto's huge estates entered full production and high yields were developing hun- dreds of kilometers away in dynamic western frontiers (Figs. 1 and 2) (Dean 1976, 161; Denis 1911, 172-76; Franca 1960;

James 1932, 226-31; Holloway 1980; Milliet 1939; Monbeig 1984 [1952], 190). By the middle 1940s, settlers and land

entrepreneurs were clearing forests on the basalt-derived soils of northwestern Parana

(Fig. 2) (Dean 1995, 269-70; Kronen 1990;

326



COFFEE LABOR REGIMES AND DEFORESTATION IN BRAZIL

22? S - - 220 S

.,

t . % PI, LI-

XD S FB03

* Study Region (Fig. 4) 0 100 200 km I I I I I

Figure 1. Location of Sao Paulo State, Brazil, and study region.

Margolis 1973, 42-55; Monbeig 1984 [1952], 255-71).

Because coffee was "insatiable of humus" it should not be surprising that an astonish- ing area of forest and woodland was cleared while Brazil dominated world coffee production. Between 1910 and 1947 the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (1 million square kilometers; Fig. 3) decreased by approximately 336,000 square kilometers. From 1907 to 1934 approximately 79,500 square kilometers of forest were lost in Sao Paulo state alone, a rate of more than 3,000 square kilometers per year between 1920 and 1934 (Dean 1995, 247; Victor 1975, 17, 29).

What explains the rapid expansion of coffee at the expense of mesophytic semideciduous forest and dense arboreal savanna (Cerradao, also referred to here as woodland)? Why was the forest-to-coffee

conversion relatively quick and accessible to so many landowners? Here I argue that the particular nature of labor relations schemes (Table 1) allowed a diverse group of landowners to overcome coffee's high transaction costs in a context of pervasive risks and information asymmetries. I seek an explanation for forest-to-coffee land conversion not at the macro-scale of coffee prices or land and immigration policies, but rather at the scale of the microeconomics of labor relations that were deployed for planting, cultivation, and harvest of coffee groves. Coffee planters reduced cost and risk primarily through labor relations, and secondarily from government subsidies. The relative success of labor relations in creating and maintaining coffee groves, however, generated conflict, manifested in various disputes over interrow cropping,

327



ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

Principal area of productive coffee groves

Figure 2. Location of principal areas of productive coffee groves and agricultural frontier in Sao Paulo and Parana, 1920-1950 (after Franca 1960).

the definition of work, and debt-mobility issues. I explore these questions through an analysis of civil and labor complaints, held in a district court archive in western Sao Paulo state, Brazil (Fig. 4).

The argument begins with a discussion of transaction-costs theory, which stresses imperfect information, risk, and monitoring in shaping contractual forms between firms, or between workers and landowners, to frame the discussion. In the next section I introduce the three models for coffee labor relations (Table 1). I then briefly discuss current explanations of forest-to-coffee land conversion in southeastern Brazil. While prevailing models stress state policies, landowner decision making as a response to exogenous factors, or the environmental suitability of forest soils and coffee, I explore the question of deforestation at the level of coffee's specific labor relations. The study region is introduced, and examples from two stream valleys, showing coffee area at its early 1960s peak, will bring later issues into sharper focus. A description of the sources and methods used concludes the section. In the next section, analysis of landowner characteristics,

risk inherent to coffee, and labor quality and monitoring reveal the inner logic of labor relations from transaction-costs and imperfect-information perspectives. Rather than a smooth-running system that always benefited workers and landowners, coffee labor relations were contentious and negotiated. In the penultimate section I consider the disputes and challenges to the labor relations system. I conclude the study by raising three open questions and sug- gesting that attention to the specific nature and logic of labor relations would comple- ment existing political ecology analyses on how labor access and labor shortages con- dition resource use.

Transaction Costs of Coffee Production

The use of labor relations as a category of analysis to understand forest-to-coffee land conversion derives from microeconomic theories on the origin and development of endogenous institutions. With regard to endogenous agricultural institutions, the transaction-cost approach stresses the costs of information, negotiat-

328




ing and enforcing contracts, and monitoring labor, while the imperfect-information school stresses asymmetrical information among economic agents (Bardhan 1989, 4-5; Stiglitz 1989, 1986; Williamson 1985, 19-20). Information asymmetries result when workers (sharecropper, contract farmer, or wage laborer) and landowners are unequally informed of land, labor, credit, technology, or marketing. For example, yields result from both labor quality and environmental factors (sun- light, soil nutrients, rainfall) and are visible only weeks or months after labor inputs (Barham and Coomes 1996, 24-25). Accordingly, coffee labor relations may be interpreted as an endogenous institution particular to the nature of coffee production, transaction costs, and asymmetrical information, as I discuss later.

Interpretations of sharecropping and contract farming from transaction-costs and imperfect-information approaches put this question into perspective. Share- cropping is not a risk-spreading institution (Cheung 1969), but rather a compromise between risk and incentive (Stiglitz 1989, 21). Sharecropping creates incentives for labor quality when supervision is costly (Chew 1991, 90; Stiglitz 1986, 258; Stiglitz 1974, 220) and results mainly from imperfect or incomplete information (Singh 1989, 68). Similarly, contract farming is interpreted as a product of imperfect infor-

mation and other transaction costs in which incentives, such as advancement of working capital, necessarily creates risks; hence reduction of risks would erode incentives (Carter, Barham, and Mesbah 1996, 42; Barham and Coomes 1996, 25).

Models of Coffee Labor Relations

Three main types of labor relations (contractual planting, sharecropping, and the colonato) characterize the twentieth-century Sao Paulo coffee frontier (Table 1). All models obtained labor from entire families (Stolcke 1995, 76-82; Collins 1993, 67). Little is known about contractual coffee planting, which was done by workers known as empreiteiros or formadores de cafe (Abreu 1972, 100-101). Contracts for formation of 5,000 to 12,000 trees, at a density of approximately 850 trees per hectare, usually lasted between four and six years, which was considered the normal maturation period for coffee planted from seed (Brannstrom 1998, 399-405). Under the four-year contract, workers were paid per coffee tree; six-year contracts stipulated no cash payment, but allowed workers to retain all coffee produced by the maturing grove (third-year harvests for two popular varieties were estimated at 12 to 16 percent of mature trees, while fourth- through sixth-year harvests were 49 to 71

Table 1

Generalized Characteristics of Labor Relations in Sao Paulo Coffee Production, 1915-1965

Contractual Planting Sharecropping Colonato

Cash payment Per tree (4-year contract) None Monthly salary per 1,000 trees

None (6-year contract) Piece rate for harvest Coffee harvest 100% (maturing trees) 50% (mature trees) None Usufruct Interrow cropping; Interrow cropping; Interrow cropping;

pasture pasture pasture Work tasks Land preparation; Cultivation and harvest Cultivation and harvest

planting; cultivation and harvest

Contract duration 4-6 years 2-3 years 1 year

329



ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

percent, respectively; see ECLA/FAO (1960, 1:35)). Strict usufruct rights were stipulated in contracts. Crops and animals produced on usufruct land were the property of contracted planters. Workers were responsible for nearly all labor and capital inputs but sometimes received cash advances from landowners, especially during the first year of the contract. An opti- mistic contemporary observer believed that the contract-planting system had "con- tributed to improve the lot of many colonos" and enriched coffee planters after "a small expenditure or none at all" (Ramos 1923, 208). Similar contractual schemes for planting cocoa existed in the Brazilian state of Bahia (Wright 1976, 78-81) and in Ecuador (Clarence-Smith 1995, 164-65).

Coffee sharecropping (known as par- ceiria or meafdo) allegedly disappeared after a failed mid-nineteenth-century experiment (Dean 1976; Holloway 1980; Martins 1979; Roseberry 1995, 17-18; Sallum 1982; Stolcke 1995; Topik 1998, 48-50). In fact, coffee sharecropping coex- isted with the colonato in mature groves and has been documented in other Brazilian regions (Lanna 1988, 86-92; Margolis 1973, 134-38) and elsewhere in Latin America (Palacios 1980, 80; Perez 1944, 85-87). Coffee sharecroppers, under two- or three-year contracts, received half the harvest and usufruct rights that were more limited than those of contracted planters. They were responsible for cultivation, usually at the rate of one adult worker per 4,000 trees, which included weeding the grove, removing debris from the area near coffee plants, spreading organic mate- rial evenly, and pruning, and received cash advances from landowners for annual crops and subsistence.

The colonato labor system, the most well known of the three, developed simultane- ously with state subsidies for European immigration as a substitute for slavery (Dean 1976, 156-93; Holloway 1980, 70-110; Stolcke 1988, 2-19; Stolcke 1995, 76-82; Stolcke and Hall 1983). Colonos received income from three sources: a monthly wage for cultivation of a specified

number of coffee trees; a piece rate per sack of coffee harvested between May and July; and highly regulated usufruct rights for annual crops, often planted between rows of coffee, and pasturage. For interrow cropping, colonos planted varying amounts of maize, beans, and rice according to the age of the trees and the monthly wage. Landowners preferred to hire colonos as family units, knowing that women and chil- dren would work in annual crops, while men would tend the coffee grove (Stolcke 1995, 77-78); contracted planters and sharecroppers probably also were preferred in family units for similar reasons.

The precise determinants of the colonato have been subject to debate. To summarize, Stolcke (1995, 81; Stolcke 1988, 137-38) has interpreted the colonato as a "cushion" that gave coffee growers "cost flexibility" to adjust to fluctuating coffee prices while maintaining a necessary work force. When coffee prices were low, landowners paid low cash wages and expanded usufruct rights. In times of high coffee prices, landowners reduced interrow cropping but increased piece-rate wages for harvest. The opposing argument is that generous usufruct rights were essen- tial to attracting relatively scarce, suitable workers. For colonos, "coffee was depen- dence, subservience, the source of justified but disagreeable conflicts, mistrust, and disciplinary measures," but interrow maize "was freedom of action and economic autonomy" (Holloway 1980, 89). Coffee planters, aware of the ecological competition between interrow food crops and coffee plants, permitted interrow cropping during the first five years and restricted the practice as the grove reached full production. But to attract or retain colonos, growers created new coffee fields with generous interrow usufruct rights.

Deforestation and Coffee in Southeastern Brazil

Explaining Deforestation for Coffee

Three general explanations exist in the

330




literature for rapid forest-to-coffee land conversion. One explanation is that rising coffee prices and fall in cost of transport, supported by state land tenure and immigration policies, motivated forest-to-coffee land conversion. Railroads lowered transport costs from the remote interior to coastal ports. The state permitted huge tracts of forested public domain to pass into private hands, usually by fraudulent means, and subsidized the yearly arrival of thousands of European immigrants for coffee growers (Dean 1995, 168-90; Love 1980, 1-8, 23-68). These phenomena created the conditions for forest-to-coffee land conversion, but they do not explain the process itself. It is also unlikely that diverse landowners would respond evenly or predictably to these policies.

A second argument emphasizes the effect of a relatively tight labor market and relatively high cost of investment in declining coffee groves in structuring decision making. It is claimed, for example, that coffee planters would face labor shortages if they abolished interrow crops in mature groves; hence planters cleared more forest for coffee, thus increasing usufruct area and attracting workers (Ramos 1923, 106, 211; Holloway 1980, 87-92; Denis 1911, 241-42). Coffee growers also allegedly decided against investment in declining groves by establishing new, higher-yielding groves on forested frontier land, where usufruct attracted labor. Some growers may have been "alchemists in reverse" who refused to use fertilizers and failed to invest in existing groves (Dean 1989; Topik 1998, 51), but most management recom- mendations appeared after 1950 (Silva 1996, 89-94; Stolcke 1988, 97-102; ECLA/FAO 1960, 1:79-86; SRB 1946). Dubious notions of labor scarcity also underpin this explanation (Stolcke 1988, 137-38; Stolcke 1995, 76-80; Welch 1999, 164).

A third, recent explanation combines the influence of state policies (above) with environmental factors. Unwavering faith in soil fertility in areas of mesophytic semideciduous forest and Cerraddo, based on the

presence of indicator tree species (Stein 1970 [1957], 31-32), was the "decisive factor" in the "inexorable" westward movement of coffee-motivated agricultural settlement (Fig. 3) (Dean 1995, 181-82, 248). Soil fertility explains that coffee yielded good harvests, but it does not explain how coffee was planted and how coffee groves were maintained. By contrast, my explanation for forest-to-coffee land conversion stresses how landowners used labor relations to capture institutional rents from railroad transport, coffee price-support mechanisms, and public lands policies. Capital accumulation required planting new coffee groves and maintaining existing ones, which, in turn, relied on securing workers within constraints of cost, information, and risk.

Case Study: Western Silo Paulo

The analysis linking coffee labor relations to deforestation was carried out in several agricultural counties (municipios) in the 10,650-square-kilometer Middle

50 W 45 50? W 450 W

Figure 3. Estimated area of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest in 1500 and 1990 (after Dean

1995, 349).

331



ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

Paranapanema-Peixe River Valley of western Sao Paulo state, Brazil (Fig. 4). Destruction of mesophytic semideciduous forest and dense arboreal savanna (Cerradao) (Furley 1992; Monbeig 1984 [1952], 85; Salis, Sheperd, and Joly 1995; Torres, Martins, and Kinoshita 1997; Brannstrom n.d.) began between 1915 and 1920, the period of arrival of the Sorocabana railroad line (Monbeig 1984 [1952]; Cobra 1923; Brannstrom 1998). The number of coffee trees in the region's municipios increased from 3.1 million in

1920 to nearly 49 million ten years later; coffee grove area increased from 1,100 hectares in 1920 to 68,240 hectares in 1930. In the early 1960s, coffee accounted for between 5 and 20 percent of rural land use area, while only between 5 and 10 percent of original forest remained (Brannstrom 1998, 280, 370). During the 1970s state policies and a devastating frost

encouraged landowners to replace coffee with mechanized soybean-wheat double

cropping (Brannstrom 1998, 564-71; Soskin 1988; Sousa 1990), which combined

/?/0o Oo I ,te --22? 15'S

-- 22? 45' S

: A

mc

Rio Paranapanema 1 - Mandaguari catchment (Fig. 5) 2 - Almogo catchment (Fig. 6)

. Sorocabana railroad

0 20 40 60 80 100 km l lI I l

Figure 4. Case study area (10,650 km2 in western Sao Paulo State, Brazil, showing location of environmental subregions: A (320 to 500 m above sea level, fine-textured Oxisols developed on basalt

formation, rolling topography, 3,425 km2); B (450 to 650 m above sea level, coarse-textured Oxisols developed on sandstone formation, rolling topography, 6,500 km2); and C (450 to 650 m above sea level, coarse-textured Alfisol-Mollisol complex with argillic subsurface horizons developed on sandstone formation, steep slopes, 725 kin2). Source: Base information obtained from unpublished data produced by the Centro de Desenvolvimento do Vale do Paranapanema ([email protected]).

22? 15' -

45'S --

332




with 1960s rural labor legislation to encourage the use of temporary wage labor (Stolcke 1988, 108-21; Graziano da Silva and Kohl 1984).

Two examples of representative drainage basins, based on analysis of 1962 aerial

photographs, show the variable nature of land conversion from forest and woodland to coffee. In the headwaters of the Mandaguari Valley (Figs. 5.A, 5.B; 31.3 square kilometers), coffee replaced Cerra- dao on flat uplands (Fig. 4, region B-C transition; coarse-textured Oxisols) and forest on some steep valley side slopes (Fig. 4, region C; coarse-textured Alfisol-Mollisol complex) (Brannstrom 1998, 34-38, 67-81; Lepsch, Buol, and Daniels 1977a, 1977b; Santana and Queiroz 1995; Castro 1989; Barros 1985). Coffee was not planted in the

savanna (Cerrado) of lower elevations of the Mandaguari (Fig. 4, region B) because of frost risk and poor soil suitability (interviews, Bertini 1997; Lobo 1997; Maia 1997; Pinarelli 1997).

In the Almoco Valley (Fig. 6; 20.2 square kilometers), which was covered nearly entirely in forest when surveyed in 1915 for land subdivision proceedings (Brannstrom n.d.), far greater area had been converted to coffee. Soil characteristics of the basalt- derived, fine-textured Oxisols developed on rolling topography (Fig. 4, region A) were considered highly for coffee production (Brannstrom 1998, 141-47). In the upper valley coffee extended to within 100 meters of the stream; coffee in the lower valley was less contiguous but nevertheless dominated uplands. By the 1980s coffee

A. 1962 Land Use * Forest ! Cerrado I1I Coffee g Annual crops I Secondary forest [- Pasture/floodplain

0 1 2 km I I I I

Figure 5. 1962 land use (A) and drainage (B) in Mandaguari catchment, western Sao Paulo State. See Figure 4 for location. Source: Sao Paulo 1962, photos 8084-87, 7716-20 (interpretation by

author).

333



ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

220 50' S ~~~~~~~\ ~530 25'W

Figure 6. 1962 land use in Almoco catchment, western Sao Paulo State. See Figure 4 for location. Source: Sao Paulo 1962, photos 8681-84, 8728-31, 8814-15 (interpretation by author).

groves had been nearly eliminated from the Almogo and Mandaguari catchments (Brannstrom 1998, 489, 587).

Sources of Evidence

I obtained empirical evidence of coffee labor relations (Table 1) primarily from judicial proceedings at the Assis Comarca (district court) archive (Brannstrom 1997) and supplemented this by structured interviews with longtime residents. I ana- lyzed court cases, mainly labor and civil complaints, for descriptions of contractual work relations. Cases usually contained the terms of the verbal or written contract and testimony by workers, landowners, and third parties. Unresolved cases com- prise most of the documentation; after disputes entered the judicial system protagonists often did not wait for the judge's ruling. The judicial documents nevertheless contain valuable and unique information used neither in the dominant envi-

ronmental-historical interpretation of Atlantic Forest destruction (Dean 1995) nor in political ecology studies of land transformation.

I systematically collected quantitative data covering 1931-65 (Tables 2 and 3) from postmortem property inventories of rural landholdings (N = 582) at the Assis Comarca's Cart6rio do Primeiro Oficio (First Notarial Office);' these types of documents have been used frequently (for example, Dean 1976; Stein 1970 [1957]). Land and improvement values were assigned by judicial inspectors but do not reflect actual market value. In the database the values were deflated to constant currency units and indexed for compari- sons over time.

1 The database is available upon request from the author.

334




Reconsidering Coffee Labor Relations

With the basic outlines of coffee labor relations and the microeconomic approach in place, I now turn to reconsider contractual planting, sharecropping, and the colonato. A diverse group of coffee produc- ers, most of whom did not specialize in coffee but had dramatically higher rural asset values than noncoffee landowners, deployed three main labor schemes to create and maintain coffee groves. New coffee groves, a "relatively expensive and inflexi- ble" investment for any landowner because of delayed returns (Topik 1998, 51), increased landowner wealth in a context of significant transaction costs (labor monitoring, need for labor quality), coffee's inherent risk in maturing and productive groves, and imperfect information.

Landowner Characteristics

Coffee groves on the Paranapanema frontier occupied relatively little land over- all (Table 2) but were an important rural asset to individual landowners (Table 3). The partial nature of coffee land cover is evidenced by two complementary sources of quantitative data. According to the Sao Paulo coffee-farm census of the early

1940s, conducted at the scale of individual farms within municipios, median area of coffee farms was 32.9 to 48.4 hectares, of which 7.5 to 12.9 hectares were devoted to a median grove size of 6,400 and 8,000 trees (Table 2). By comparison, 1931-32 mean coffee grove size for Sao Paulo was 17,700; the range for the state's western regions was 15,000 to 19,000 (Kageyama 1979, 106; Stolcke 1998, 60-61). Median area planted in coffee on individual farms was between 19 and 29 percent. Analysis of postmortem property inventories for 1931-65 corroborates the farm-level coffee census, showing that median coffee grove size was 9,400 trees (19 percent of area) on median landholding of 47.2 hectares (Table 2).

Although it covered a relatively small area, coffee added significant value to farms (Table 3). Inventoried coffee farms, 26 percent of valid sampled cases with rural assets, had only somewhat larger median land area than noncoffee farms (47.2 compared to 36.1 hectares). Major differences appear when comparing the index value of improvement value (all farms = 100); for coffee farms the figure is 623, while only 40 for noncoffee farms. Nearly 50 percent of this high value for rural assets on coffee farms came from rural improvements, which usually

able 2

Magnitude of Coffee Farming in Western Sao Paulo Coffee Grove Size Median Median Total

(1,000 Trees) Grove Area Grove Area Landholding Median Mean (Hectares) (% Land Area) (Hectares)

Municipio, 1941a Assis (N = 216) 6.4 14.3 7.5 19.4 44.8 Candido Mota (N = 333) 8.0 12.7 9.4 28.7 32.9

Echaporr (N = 371) 11.0 17.1 12.9 27.8 48.4 Assis Comarca

1931-1965 (N = 154) 8.0 10.9 9.4 19.4 47.2

Source: Municipio data from Sao Paulo (1943-44, 4:30-49, 104-21; Sao Paulo 1943-44, 5:6-17); Assis Comarca sources from author's postmortem property inventory database. Note: Coffee grove area calculated at 850 trees per hectare (Dean 1995, 186; interviews, Maia 1997; Rochado 1997; Pinarelli 1997). aSee Figure 4 for location of municipio.

335



Table 3

Comparison of Median Land and Improvement Values on Inventoried Landholdings in the Middle Paranapanema-Peixe Valley, 1931-1965

Land Area

Hectares Index (Median) Value

Median Improvement Value

Index % Total Value Rural Assets

Total Rural Asset Value

Index Value Mean % Median Total Assets

All farms (N = 582) 36.3 100.0 100.0 11.2 100.0 94.1 Coffee farms (N = 154) 47.2 109.1 623.0 48.5 249.9 94.0 Noncoffee farms (N = 428) 36.1 90.9 40.2 5.1 73.9 94.2

Source: Author's postmortem property inventory database. Note: Values deflated to 1931 currency index and indexed (all farms = 100) (Martins and Johnston 1992, 321-22).

included coffee groves and drying areas; other landholding categories had far lower contribution of rural improvements to total assets (11.2 and 5.1 percent). Differences in total improvement value are less dra- matic (250 compared to 74). No differences appear in proportion of assets in rural property (94 percent for all farm types), indicating weak linkages between urban and rural sources of wealth. Most coffee farmers had exclusively rural assets.

Labor Quality and Monitoring Labor quality was critical in creating cof-

fee groves from forested land and maintaining yields in mature groves. Sequential labor inputs had important carryover effects in reducing damage from climate extremes and pest outbreaks, in ensuring future productivity of groves, and in ame- liorating natural productivity swings (Ramos 1923, 103-4, 106-16, 118-19). Consequently, labor monitoring was a high transaction cost for coffee production.

Regular weeding, an estimated 36 percent of total yearly labor inputs (ECLA/FAO 1960, 1:55), was necessary to prevent excessive competition between coffee and other plants. Eradication of leaf- cutting ants (Atta sp) demanded close attention by workers, who applied poison to new colonies to break the reproductive cycle. Because poor cultivation and Atta populations negatively affected later yields, labor relations contracts often specified the

number of weedings and other necessary tasks (see next section).

New groves demanded higher labor quality. Proper spacing and planting of plants was necessary to achieve healthy, productive trees at the period of highest productive potential, approximately 8 to 15 years after planting. In addition, weed competition was stronger, because of more exposed soil, and had a more severe impact on maturing coffee than on mature groves. Leaf-cutting ants could do more damage in newly planted groves than in mature ones. While a mature tree could recover from losing some leaves, a maturing tree suffered proportionately more damage (Ramos 1923, 91-100).

Risk and Cost of Coffee Groves

Forest-to-coffee land conversion faced the high sunk cost of coffee groves and climate extremes within a general context of imperfect information, such as the future price of coffee and cyclical yield fluctua- tions. Coffee groves could not be converted easily to other forms of capital. Risk is inherent to coffee and other agricultural crops because of production characteristics, such as reduced or variable yields, damage from climate extremes, and long gestation period (Goodman and Redclift 1991, 88-92; Goodman and Watts 1994, 39-40; Mann 1990, 33-45).

Winter frost was well known to reduce productivity for a few years, depending on

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY 336




the severity of plant damage (Ramos 1923, 47-60). As indicated in the cases of the Almogo and Mandaguari catchments, groves had to locate on upper slopes to avoid risk of frost in valley floors (Figs. 5 and 6), which impeded specialization in coffee (Table 2). Newly planted and maturing coffee groves were even more susceptible to climate extremes of frost, rainfall, and drought. Damage from a strong down- pour, for example, could uproot newly maturing coffee and lengthen the already long period without returns on investment; in mature groves strong rain would produce less damage.

Contractual Planting, Sharecropping, and Colonato

With the basic parameters of landowner characteristics, labor quality and monitoring, and risk and cost considerations, the three models of labor relations (Table 1) may be placed in sharper focus. Contractual coffee planting was a solution to transaction costs and risks inherent to establishing new coffee groves from forest and Cerradao. Coffee planting under contract demanded high risk tolerance and good information from workers because much could go wrong and destroy a newly planted grove. But workers had good prospects for accumulation; for example, if a landless contracted coffee planter "got it right, and could get a good sixth-year harvest, he could already buy a 10-25 hectare farm" (interview, Pinarelli 1997). Although accumulation depended on various factors discussed earlier, family histories and per- sonal testimony suggest that a successful contractual coffee-planting job was a proven, if risky, means to move from landless status to landowner (interviews, Bertini 1997; Lobo 1997; Maia 1997). In a case of two workers contracted in 1928 for planting 10,500 and 10,000 trees at the rate of 0.6 mil-reis (U.S. $0.07) per plant, their account books showed a positive balance of 4,506 mil-reis ($538 in 1928; $227 in 1932) and 4,553 mil-reis ($544 in 1928; $230 in 1932), which they received after suing the

landowner (Terrado and Moreira v. Marques 1933). During this period judicial estimates of the value of first-class land ranged from 62 to 165 mil-reis per hectare (Brannstrom n.d.).

The colonato offered easiest entry to workers and demanded least risk. For cer- tain classes of landowners, the colonato offered the benefits of controlling the entire harvest, while usufruct rights (interrow cropping) ensured a minimum of colono attention to weeding and harvest labor. Contrary to arguments for colono upward mobility (Font 1990, 19-27; Font 1995, 182; Holloway 1980, 146-65), the colonato offered least opportunity for accumulation and was the lowest contractual form of rural labor. Colonos could never expect to improve their life because they relied on a monthly salary (interviews, Maia 1997; Lobo 1997; Bertini 1997) and suffered declining wages during the infla- tionary post-1950 period (Stolcke 1988, 90-91; Welch 1999, 377). Low prospects for accumulation made the colonato unpopular among workers on the coffee frontier. Workers preferred sharecropping to the colonato because it offered greater potential for accumulation from the coffee harvest and workers could gamble on good harvests from coffee and annual crops planted interrow or separately. Share- cropping also lacked the stigma of working for wages and conferred higher status (interviews, Maia 1997; Bertini 1997; Rochado 1997).

Landowners adopted sharecropping and contractual planting not only as a way to attract workers unsatisfied with the colonato, but also because of the incentives that maintained labor quality while lowering supervision costs. Both models were useful because they greatly improved harvest labor supply and lowered recruitment costs. Most coffee farms in the Paranapanema-Peixe were relatively small, did not specialize in coffee, and devoted relatively small area to coffee (Table 2). In this context we could expect that landowners benefited from labor systems that reduced supervision costs and maintained

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labor quality by offering incentives (usufruct, shared or future harvest) to workers. Landowners able or willing to specialize in coffee may have preferred the colonato; although they faced increased supervision costs, they could control the entire coffee harvest and reduce interrow cropping.

Regulating Coffee Labor Relations

The labor relations supporting forest-to- coffee land conversion were not automatic or uncontested, but were redefined and tested by workers and landowners. This phenomenon may be divided into three analytical categories: the definition of work, interrow cropping, and work debt and mobility.

Defining and Disciplining Work

Specific definitions of work in contractual coffee planting, sharecropping, and the colonato enforced the reduction of labor-monitoring costs and increased labor quality. Coffee-planting contracts, for example, defined the coffee tree as a planting mound (cova) with three to eight inter- twined stems that had sprouted from dif- ferent seeds, between 1.0 and 1.2 meters in height, and with standard 3.5-meter spacing between covas (Pinto v. Hikawa 1936; Modos v. Takemori and Takemori 1954; Carvalho v. Isper 1953; Japolucci 1932; Lex v, Matos 1963). In one case, the landowner even specified the dimensions of the planting hole as 0.50 meter across and 0.25 meter deep (Lex v. Matos 1963). Clauses in coffee-planting contracts demanded that workers keep the grove "always clean" or "free from weeds" and required weeding as "often as necessary" (Vasconcellos v. Camargo 1929; Terrado and Moreira v. Marques 1933). A clause in one contract, conveniently overlooking class differences between landowner and contractor, tried to persuade the worker to

"treat the coffee grove as well as possible, as if it were his" (Damasceno v. Silva 1953).

Contractual planting also defined labor inputs necessary in the case of damage from frost and insects. Four-year contracts added an extra year and required workers to replant trees damaged by frost, fire, or locust attack. Longer contracts, clearly advantageous to landowners and risky to workers, simply required the replanting of damaged trees without an extra year. Leaf- cutting ants were a special concern, and contract clauses determined either that landowners would supply insecticide for workers to apply on colonies (Cintra v. Silva 1932; Vasconcellos v. Camargo 1929; Penga v. Ramos 1931; Terrado and Moreira v. Marques 1933; Lex v. Matos 1963; Modos v. Takemori and Takemori 1954) or that workers would buy at least half the poison in addition to applying it (Midena v. Allevato 1922; Silva v. Scolori 1925; Torres v. Simoes 1927).

Coffee-planting schemes gave landowners various means for punishing workers who broke a clause in the contract and did not produce a coffee grove meeting the stated definition. A four-year contract, for example, established the per-tree payment at 0.8 mil-reis (U.S. $0.098) and demanded that the worker pay the landowner 2 mil- reis ($0.24) for each malformed tree (Cintra v. Silva 1932). Five- or six-year contracts, in which there was no cash settlement, required workers to pay variable fines for each malformed tree (Cr$3 [$0.16] in 1952, but Cr$50 [$2.70] in 1953; Damasceno v. Silva 1953; Carvalho v. Isper 1953).

Sharecropping had similar definitions of labor inputs and punishment for infringe- ment. Although one contract demanded ten annual weedings from the sharecropper (Siqueira and Franco v. Nascimento 1964), others ordered "as many as necessary" (Japolucci 1932), with the right of landowners to determine how many weedings were "necessary." A clause in another contract reminded sharecroppers that their work in the coffee groves "[took] prece- dence over all other [crops]" and urged the

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sharecroppers to "encourage the clear development of the crop and subsequent constant improvement of production" (Lex v. Tangarelli 1946). In one contract, the landowner reserved the right to send day laborers to a sharecropper's grove if the work "did not appear in order" and failed to meet vaguely defined standards-and then send the labor bill to the sharecropper for payment (Coelho v. Pinheiro 1964). Sharecropping placed fewer demands on workers to assume risk from frost and insects because the duration usually covered only one or two years, and mature groves were less susceptible to frost and leaf-cutting ants. Fines for violation of a contract clause varied from 50,000 mil-reis (U.S. $5,967) to 5,000 mil-reis ($597) in 1929 (Pinto v. Hikawa 1936; Japolucci 1932). In the early 1950s fines ranged from Cr$10,000 ($538) to Cr$50,000 ($2,688) (Carvalho v. Isper 1953; Modos v. Takemori and Takemori 1954).

Colonato contracts may have had more detailed specifications of labor inputs, per- haps because cash wages offered less incentive to increase labor quality and improve coffee harvests. A typical colonato contract from the late 1950s, for example, obligated workers to weed the grove monthly, replant ailing trees, and follow a specified process leading up to the harvest. All workers had to report to their groves each morning at the sound of a bell or horn. Family members caught working outside the coffee farm would be fined the equivalent of a day's rural wage (Cr$50 [U.S. $0.35] per day) (Nunes v. Lavagnini 1960).

Detailed contract clauses were important because landowners used civil lawsuits to bring about payment of fines, and, in turn, to force workers off the job or to demand higher-quality labor. In the middle 1940s, for example, landowner Alberto Jose Garcia pressured contracted planter Olindo Felipe de Lima to improve his work on 15,000 maturing trees or pay a Cr$5,000 fine (U.S. $263). Lima, a 47-year-old native of Minas Gerais, whose 11 family members worked to plant and cultivate the trees,

raised the cash and paid the fine as a way to leave the Garcia plantation, but alleged that Garcia had set animals loose on the family's cropland as a way to force them out (AJP v. Lima 1948). In another case, in 1927, a lawsuit to enforce a fine for breaking the contract (2,508 mil-reis; U.S. $296) was abandoned by the landowner after the contracted coffee planter quickly cleared weeds and brush that had invaded the grove. Witnesses would later claim that the grove was "so well treated that a better looking plantation could not be found" (Torres v. Sim&es 1927).

Regulating Interrow Cropping Interrow annual crops within coffee

groves, part of the incentive to increase work quality while lowering monitoring costs, were strictly regulated in contractual coffee planting, sharecropping, and the colonato. Potentially, interrow food crops would create an incentive for improved cultivation of coffee groves; workers who carefully weeded their interrow crops were also likely to keep weeds out of the coffee grove. If workers were guaranteed all or a fixed portion of the coffee harvest, the incentive to care for the grove increased. Interrow crops also made adequate harvest labor more likely in the poor-information context, as workers who harvested annual crops would remain to harvest coffee to obtain their share or piece rate. In practice, however, interrow cropping was contentious and strictly regulated.

Coffee-planting contracts indicated how many rows of each annual crop could be planted each year. In spite of the diversity of specific practices, some generalizations may be made: (1) during the first year of coffee-planting contracts, landowners limited contractors to two or three rows of maize, beans, and rice between coffee rows; (2) midway through the contract, the numbers of rows for maize, beans, and rice were reduced; (3) by the end of the contract, maize was banned or restricted to one row, or to the "empty space," the cen- ter of the square formed by four coffee

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trees (Cintra v. Silva 1932; Penga v. Ramos 1931; Pinto v. Hikawa 1936; Souza v. Figueiredo 1933; Torres v. Simoes 1927). A 1928 contract for 20,000 trees reveals the specificity of interrow crop regulation. The landowners allowed two rows of maize, two rows of beans, and three rows of rice during the first year; in the last year of the contract, the contractor could plant only two rows of beans, one row of rice, and two maize stalks in the "empty space" (Vasconcellos v. Camargo 1929). A mid- 1950s contract for 18,000 trees permitted three maize and six rice rows in the first year and one maize and two rice rows in the fifth and final year (Modos v. Takemori and Takemori 1954).

Sharecropping contracts, always in mature groves with increased coffee- annual crop competition for nutrients, imposed more restrictions. A 1940s contract, for example, made a typical range of options available between rows of coffee: one row of maize, two of rice, or four of beans (Lex v. Tangarelli 1946). A contract from the 1950s allowed sharecroppers to choose from either two rice rows, two peanut rows, or four bean rows (Costa v. Batista 1960). A typical contract from the early 1960s permitted two maize stalks in the "empty space" of alternating rows; two rows of beans were permitted where maize was planted, and one row of rice was allowed in nonmaize rows (Silva v. Veigand 1963). Sharecropping relations sometimes extended beyond coffee to interrow crops and annual crops planted on separate plots (Siqueira and Franco v. Nascimento 1964; Scheler v. Dias 1949).

The limited amount of interrow cropping was a serious concern for sharecroppers. As a court-appointed expert stated during a mid-1950s lawsuit, interrow cultivation "rarely provided satisfactory com- pensation to the sharecropper" in years of low coffee productivity. Severe restrictions on interrow cropping, mandated by landowners "in order not to harm the coffee," meant that sharecroppers' "chances for profit [were] considerably smaller" (Gonfalves v. Maia 1956).

Interrow cropping generated legal disputes when landowners believed that sharecroppers were spending too much effort on annual crops and too little work on coffee. For example, a sharecropper of 14,000 coffee trees on a 24-hectare farm was accused in 1936 of "filling the coffee rows" with maize, manioc, and squash, which were planted too close to the coffee trees and therefore "[damaged] the coffee grove" (Rueda v. Carvalho 1936). Another dispute over interrow crops occurred in 1946, when a prominent landowner sued a sharecropper for the stipulated Cr$10,000 fine (U.S. $500) for breaking the four-year contract. The landowner alleged that the sharecropper had done poor work "because he cared more for the [interrow] grain plantations" than the coffee groves and kept double the number of animals allowed in usufruct pasture (Lex v. Tangarelli 1946).

Debt and Mobility Debt relations and mobility restrictions

introduced new transaction costs into labor relations, but, in the information-poor context, reduced the chance for shortage of harvest labor and were used to demand increased labor quality in advance of observable yields. Contract planters and sharecroppers also sought debt relations; workers entered rural labor relations contracts at the end of the off-season (September) when they most needed cash, food, and supplies.

Coffee-planting contracts frequently defined the nature of the debt relation. One landowner agreed to advance up to 5,000 mil-reis (U.S. $597) during the first year-but only if the contractor showed "good work" in the maturing grove (Vasconcellos v. Camargo 1929). Other contracts obliged the landowner to supply the worker's subsistence needs when necessary, with the sum deducted from the final settlement (Torres v. Simoes 1927; Marques v. Rodrigues 1926). Some contracts, however, made clear that the landowner was under no obligation to

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advance cash or supplies to the contractor (Cintra v. Silva 1932).

Landowners used proof of debt and alle- gations of poor labor quality to initiate legal proceedings against laborers for eviction or interrow crop seizure. Two cases reveal how this process could work. In 1960 Isaltino Ribeiro, owner of a 484-hectare farm with 40,000 coffee trees and annual crops farmed on shares, sued Antonio Penteado, a sharecropper of 7,550 coffee trees and 1.2 hectares of rice on a separate plot. After receiving the first installment of approximately Cr$30,200 (U.S. $237) advance, Penteado allegedly "completely abandoned" the coffee grove and interrow crops under his care and sought paid work on nearby farms. Ribeiro won the case after court-supervised inspection revealed that Penteado had not weeded his coffee grove (Ribeiro v. Penteado 1960).

In a second case, landowner Joaquim das Neves sued two contracted coffee planters, Alvaro Guimaraes and Camilo Viana, in 1930. Neves alleged that they had begun "to dedicate themselves exclusively to the planting of grain crops, which they are now harvesting" while "most of the coffee grove was entirely overtaken by weeds." The complaint went forward in the court system in part because Neves showed proof of a debt relationship with both workers (U.S. $63 and $86 for rice, beans, salted cod, meat, sugar, salt, lard, matches, kerosene, tobacco, and 9 liters of liquor). Neves abandoned the case after the workers were noti- fied of the complaint by court officials, pre- sumably without further need to mobilize the judicial state for increased labor quality (Neves v. Guimaraes and Viana 1930).

As these cases suggest, landowners linked interrow cropping to debt relations. A sharecropping contract from the early 1960s determined that landowner advances, with interest, had to be settled after the first harvest of annual crops. The landowner had "absolute preference in the sale of worker surpluses," and sharecroppers could only sell their surplus "after pay- ing their debt to the landowner" (Coelho v. Pinheiro 1964). Another early 1960s con-

tract, in which the landowner was commit- ted to advancing Cr$2,000 (U.S. $6.57 to $4.34) in monthly installments between November 1962 and May 1963, required that the sharecropper begin repayment of advances with the first harvest of annual crops (Siqueira and Franco v. Nascimento 1964).

Landowners restricted off-farm work by sharecroppers and demanded labor in rou- tine maintenance of fences, pasture, and roads. One contract allowed the sharecropper and his family to seek outside work "only when there [was] no work" on the coffee farm and "when the agricultural field [was] well treated" (Lex v. Tangarelli 1946). In the case of a two-year contract for 8,000 trees, sharecroppers were required to work "when called upon" at the rate of Cr$150 (U.S. $0.49) per day and could be fined Cr$500 ($1.64) for every day of off- farm work (Silva v. Veigand 1963). Contractual coffee planting usually imposed light restrictions, requiring a few days of work per year for clearing brush from pastures or repairing fences (Japolucci 1932; Torres v. Simdes 1927; Lex v. Matos 1963; Carvalho v. Isper 1953).

Conclusions Three unresolved issues and the relation

of the case study to political ecology merit concluding remarks. First, the scope and intensity of deforestation would be known more precisely with quantitative data on individual coffee planters, their predomi- nant labor relations, and farm-level deforestation rates. These data are unavailable. My approach was to reconstruct labor relations from qualitative sources, then use microeconomic theory to suggest how and why labor schemes may have intensified forest-to-coffee conversion. Second, I approached the issue of how coercion enforced perceptions of risk and transaction costs not to prove or disprove Brass's (1997, 62-68; see also Steinfield and Engerman 1997, 120, 125-26) latest claims on the free-unfree labor dichotomy. Rather, the analysis suggested that some

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microeconomic production factors were especially prone to particular forms of coercion, in which the judicial state was directly or indirectly involved. Third, workers in coffee groves may appear as a poorly differentiated category, but the existence of three models of labor relations suggests a heterogeneous class of rural workers. Although court cases used for this analysis gave little background and only mention age and place of birth of protagonists, it is known that the rural Sao Paulo labor force was differentiated between southern Europeans and their descendants (Holloway 1980; Stolcke 1988), northeast- ern Brazilians (Dantas 1941; Welch 1999; Durham 1968), and Japanese workers (Lesser 1999; Nogueira 1973, 1986). Rural work itself was differentiated by ethnicity, with southern Europeans (especially Italians) preferred for coffee and north- eastern Brazilians for cotton, while Japanese were mainly preferred for cotton but also entered into coffee groves as sharecroppers and contract planters.

Reconceptualization of labor relations on the Brazilian coffee frontier informs a trend within political ecology that stresses that access to labor is a key factor in under- standing resource use. Political ecology often has critiqued neo-Malthusian explanations and the "free-rider" assertion in explaining resource degradation in common property systems, especially in peasant or subsistence-oriented societies (Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, 27-30; Bryant and Bailey 1997, 10-15; Peet and Watts 1996, 3-13). As Carey (1993, 329) argued, the focus on common- property regimes led to "overemphasized analysis of land" at the expense of analysis of how access to labor determines access to land. Other recent work has stressed the role of labor shortages, caused by state agricultural policies, as a key factor in the loss of biodiversity in the Peruvian Andes (Zimmerer 1996) and the inability to maintain soil conservation in highland Bolivia (Zimmerer 1993).

Early-twentieth-century labor regimes in the coffee groves of southeastern Brazil

intensified forest-to-coffee conversion by reducing expense, risk, and supervision costs, while encouraging labor quality. This claim does not deny the influence of state policies on deforestation, but specifies the means by which landowners responded to macro-scale structures, policies, and economic forces. Labor relations were the means by which a diverse group of landowners captured institutional rents from railroad transport, coffee price-support mechanisms, and public lands policies. Accumulation required planting new groves and maintaining existing ones. These tasks, in turn, depended ultimately on mobilizing labor within constraints of cost, information, and risk. For a heterogeneous class of rural workers, labor relations created differing potential for capital accumulation. Conflicts suggest, however, that workers did not always accept the terms of a labor system that decidedly favored those with access to forested land.

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Cases

All cases are from Centro de Documentafao e Amparo a Pesquisa, Arquivo do F6rum da Comarca de Assis, Cartorio do Primeiro Oficio (CEDAP/AFCA/CPO), unless other- wise noted.

AJP [A Justi9a Publica] v. Lima, A. 1948. Processo-crime. Caixa 283.

Carvalho, B. L. v. Isper, M. 1953. Acao ordinairia de cobranca. Caixa 253.

Cintra, D. S. v. Silva, J. N. 1932. Agao sumaria. Caixa 90.

Coelho, J. D. v. Pinheiro, J. L. 1964. Reintegra9ao de posse. Caixa 387.

Costa, M. R. v. Batista, L. 1960. Reintegragao de posse. Caixa 356.

Damasceno, W. v. Silva, P. F. 1953. Aiao ordinaria de recisao de contrato e cobranca de multa. Caixa 247.

Gon9alves, J. R. v. Maia, A. 1956. Acao ordinaria de cobranca. Caixa 320.

Japolucci, M. 1932. Inventario. Caixa 66.

345



ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

Lex, G. v. Tangarelli, S. 1946. Acao ordinaria de recisao de contrato e multa. Caixa 152-ci. CEDAP/AFCA, Cart6rio do Segundo Oficio.

Lex, G. v. Matos, S. A. 1963. A9ao ordinaria. Caixa 426.

Marques Junior, M. v. Rodrigues, A. 1926. A9ao ordinaria. Caixa 118.

Midena, J. v. Allevato, F. 1922. Acao ordinaria. Caixa 99.

Modos, A. v. Takemori, P., and Takemori, P. 1954. Vistoria. Caixa 257.

Neves, J. v. Guimaraes, A., and Viana, C. 1930. Acao de recisao de contrato. Caixa 111.

Nunes, O. G. v. Lavagnini, H. 1960. Reclamacao trabalhista. Caixa 325.

Penga, P. v. Ramos, G. D. 1931. Aico sumaria de cobranca. Caixa 100.

Pinto, L. 0. v. Hikawa, T. 1936. Acao de manuteniao de posse. Caixa 117.

Ribeiro, I. B. v. Penteado, A. L. 1960. Vistoria. Caixa 346.

Rueda, J. V. v. Carvalho, V. M. 1936. Agao ordinaria. Caixa 94.

Scheler, A. v. Dias, J. M. 1949. Aao trabalhista. Caixa 216.

Silva, F. S. v. Scolori, S., Scolori, F., Scolori, P. and Vendramini, B. 1925. Acao ordinaria de recisao de contrato. Caixa 84.

Silva, P. F. v. Veigand, J. 1963. Acao ordinaria de rescisao. Caixa 428.

Siqueira, J., and Franco, B. 0. v. Nascimento, S. R. 1964. ReintegraaZo de posse. Caixa 387.

Souza, J. M. v. Figueiredo, T. 1933. Adao sumaria. Caixa 115.

Terrado, J. R., and Moreira, J. A. v. Marques Junior, M. 1933. Acao sumaria de cobranca. Caixa 105.

Torres, C. P. v. Sim6es, M. 1927. Acao ordinaria. Caixa 88.

Vasconcellos, V. J. S. v. Camargo, J. 1929. Acao ordinaria. Caixa 115.

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Documents

Coffee Labor Regimes and Deforestation on a Brazilian Frontier, 1915-1965