Amerindian Agriculture in an Urbanising Amazonia (Rio Negro, Brazil)

International audienceThis article explores the transformations undergone by indigenous agricultural systems in periurban areas of the Rio Negro (Amazonas, Brazil). Rather than losing their characteristics, these systems have basically been transposed from a forest context to periurban areas, maintaining multi-plot cultivation, dynamic management of agrobiodiversity and traditional knowledge. But this agriculture is confronted by the values of modernity embedded in urban agriculture. The recognition of the ecological and cultural relevance of indigenous practices depends on new kinds of market integration and partnerships. Since the 1980s, the population of the three main towns in the Upper and Mid Rio Negro, in northwestern Brazilian Amazonia, has steadily increased and is now on the point of exceeding the rural population. In this region, located 400 km upstream from Manaus, population density is low (under one inhabitant per square kilometre). The phenomenon concerns all of Brazilian Amazonia. In 2000, 68 percent of the Amazonian population lived in urban areas; today this figure has increased to nearly 75 percent and continues to rise rapidly. At present, nineteen cities have populations of over 100,000 inhabitants each. Manaus and Belém , each with about 2 million people, have the largest concentrations of the urban population. However, towns have been emerging and growing along the agricultural frontier since the 1970s (Browder and Godfrey, 1997), and, more recently, urban growth has also become significant in remote areas such as the Rio Negro, in Amazonas State (Eloy, Le Tourneau and Théry , 2005). Whether along rivers or along roads, population growth takes place mainly in urban centres. Population movements between towns and forests are often temporary or circular , depending upon school calendars and those of productive activities (agriculture