Through Amazonian Eyes: The Human Ecology of Amazonian Populations

3. Upland Forests

Upland Forests Amazonian upland forests constitute one of the richest terrestrial ecosystems in the biosphere, with the greatest accumulations of species and plant biomass on the planet. This is the area that has been experiencing the most devastating rates of deforestation ever recorded in human historyalready amounting to over 500,000 square kilometers (Mahar I988). While in I975 less than 0.6 percent of these forests had been cut down, that percentage is now believed to be close to I2 percent in the Brazilian Amazon. This is not the result of population pressure, as has been often thought, but, rather, is a product of government policies which provided tax exemptions to individuals and firms to "develop the Amazon." This type of development has involved the conversion of a "free good" (the forest) into one given economic value through deforestation. According to long-standing legislation, deforestation constitutes an "improvement" that demonstrates that the wild landscape has now been occupied and can enter economic relations of production and exchange. Thus, a frenzy of deforestation began in the early I970s to capture the fiscal transfers and to speculate on the development of a land market. If such land occupation had led to significant employment of the rural poor one might find some consolation in these events, but the reality is that most of the land deforested was converted to pasture land, grazed by few cattle per unit of land and tended by barely one cowhand per 300 hectares. The economic return to the people of Latin American countries has been very low-except to a handful of already wealthy individuals and firms who received capital transfers. In areas like Rondonia, Brazil, where good roads were put in, up to 26 percent of the forests have already been felled. No less important has been the devastating impact that these processes of deforestation have had on native Amazonians. Many areas of the upland forests had served until these last two decades as refuge areas for native peoples from the incursions of European colonial and contemporary Latin American societies who sought to enslave and occupy the land of native populations. In this process the most effective agent of colonization has been epidemic disease, often spread in advance of major direct contact between Amazonians and outsiders. As recently as the late I960s, for example, the Suru! Indians of Rondonia suffered mortality of 75 percent in the first decade of contact. The process is being repeated before the eyes of the media today in the case of the Yanomami, whose lands have been invaded by over 50,000 gold miners. Miners, often in poor health due to poverty, carry more than their share of the diseases against which native Amazonians have little resistance (Cleary I990). 58 UPLAND FORESTS 59 Often blamed for causing much of the deforestation of the upland forests of Amazonia have been the colonists who came to settle the land along the roads that were built in the early 1970S in Brazil and earlier in the "Andean" countries with Amazon territories (d. Myers 1991). By and large, this blame is undeserved.' By the end of the 1970S colonists were responsible for less than 4 percent of the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon (Browder 1986). While government plans aimed to move hundreds of thousands of families to the "highways of national integration" (the Transamazon Highway , the Cuiaba-Santarem highway, the North Perimeter Road, and the Carretera Marginal de la Selva), the number of families who dared to confront this exotic and often feared habitat was far more modest. Moreover, figures of immigration often fail to mention that many colonists return to their areas of origin once they see the lack of infrastructure for productive activity in much of interfluvial Amazonia. Dropout rates from colonization projects have been as high as 95 percent and more often than not over 65 percent in the first ten years of settlement. Sometimes the departing colonists are replaced by others, but in some cases whole colonization projects have been abandoned because of poor soils, steepness, malaria, or lack of access to markets.2 Small-scale colonists generally temper their initial enthusiasm and grand plans within a couple of years and retreat to a more traditional intensive mode of production that emphasizes subsistence and modest surplus production (Moran 1981; Smith 1982b). The impact of colonists has been greater in the Andean countries and in Rondonia-although in the latter cattle...