Back to category: Foreign

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.

The Changing Agricultural Landscape in the Brazilian Amazon

Introduction
Since colonial explorers first sought to transform the Amazon into an agricultural landscape, agriculture in the Amazon has signified a means for taming the “wild” rainforest and benefiting human society. Alfred Russell Wallace, an English naturalist that studied in the Amazon from 1849-52, believed that in the Amazon “nature and the climate are nowhere more favorable to the labourer, and I fearlessly assert that here the ‘primeval’ forest can be converted into rich pasture and meadow land, into cultivated fields, gardens and orchards, containing every variety of produce, with half the labour…” (Wallace 1853: 335 in de Onis 1992: 24). The belief that the Amazon’s lush greenery indicated fertile soils suitable for commercial agriculture carried weight throughout the agricultural development plans of the 1960s-1980s. Agrarian reform programs and the development of the cattle industry during this period sought to ease population pressures in northeastern a...

Posted by: John Mayes

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.