SAFN is honored to recognize Lucas E.A. Prates with the 2025 Thomas Marchione Food as a Human Right award for his ongoing research in Brazil’s Amazon. This annual award is given to a student whose work continues and expands Dr. Marchione’s efforts toward food justice, food security and access, and most directly, food as a human right. It is given to those who are trying to work, in Dr. Marchione’s words, on “the best and more sustainable approaches to fulfill the right to food.”
Prates, a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology and the Humanities at Princeton University, brings a wealth of experience working in the right to food in Brazil as a legal attorney. His ethnographic research turns the lens of food security to Amazonian “agrarian elites” in order to examine their understanding of their roles in food security and climate change in the region. By focusing on the role of elites, Prates “studies up” (referencing Laura Nader) and may illuminate the barriers and possibilities to achieving the right to food for marginalized communities.
Prates research reflects Thomas Marchione’s commitments, of which he writes:
“Drawing from Marchione (1999) and his collaborative work with Messer and Cohen (2001), I show how conflicts over land and other natural resources in Amazonia function simultaneously as causes and consequences of hunger among marginalized populations. The expansion of agribusiness in the region generates structural conditions that deepen food insecurity, yet this insecurity, in turn, reinforces agribusiness’s cultural and symbolic appeal. As growing numbers of people are drawn into its orbit, a self-perpetuating cycle of hunger and inequality is sustained.”
Lucas Prates is a joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) at Princeton University. His dissertation explores industrial agribusiness and settler colonialism in the Brazilian Amazon, where he conducted eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among large-scale farmers and landowners.
Prates examines how agrarian elites in the Amazon make sense of their world through a settler-colonial imaginary. Amid intensifying political, legal, and environmental pressures, these elites have begun adopting conservation practices that gesture toward reshaping food systems and regional ecologies. While Brazil’s rise as a global agricultural powerhouse has drawn critical attention to its industrial agribusiness model, the role and subjectivity of the rural elites who uphold it have largely escaped scrutiny. Prates addresses this gap by analyzing the worldviews, ethical frameworks, and political imaginaries of Amazonian elites. His research investigates how they navigate climate insecurity and food production, and how they reconcile extractive, unequal practices with demands for sustainability and food rights, primarily through initiatives of Payments for Environmental Services. While these actors increasingly speak the language of environmentalism, Lucas shows that their actions often entrench the very logics of industrial agribusiness. His work illuminates the contradictions of elite-led environmental reform and contributes to broader debates on food sovereignty, ecological justice, and the right to food in a deeply unequal and ecologically threatened region.
Prates has presented his work at various academic venues, including the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the 2024 Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) conference. At Princeton, he has been named a Lassen Fellow in the Program of Latin American Studies (PLAS), a Graduate Fellow at the Brazil LAB, and a Prize Fellow in the Social Sciences. His research has also been supported by grants from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI), and the C.V. Starr Fellowship Fund.
Lucas is also a licensed attorney with the Brazilian Bar Association. Before his doctoral studies, he held legal positions in the public sector and with non-profit organizations in Brazil, focusing on human rights—especially the right to food and nutrition. He worked at FIAN Brazil, a global leader in this field, and currently serves on the boards of both FIAN Brazil and FIAN International. He is also a former counselor of Brazil’s National Council on Food and Nutrition Security (CONSEA). Lucas holds an LL.B. from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) and an LL.M. in Human Rights from Birkbeck, University of London.
FoodAnthropology 