- Based on current trends, the Pan Amazon should have a total population of about sixty million by 2050 and stabilize at about 65 million by 2100.
- Currently, the Pan Amazon is home to approximately 43 million people. Of these, 80% are represented by immigrants or their descendants.
- Although there was a major population growth in the 1970s and 19880s, birth rates have been gradually decreasing and stabilzing.
One reason it is possible to be optimistic about the future of the Pan Amazon is that none of the countries must deal with an impending demographic explosion. This was not always the case. In the 1970s, high birth rates and Roman Catholic traditions suggested that Latin America was facing a demographic time bomb. Populations in Amazonian countries were expanding by 2.4% to 3.5 % annually, a rate that would have doubled their population every twenty years. The colonization schemes of the 1970s and 1980s were conceived, in part, to create a safety valve for an expanding population.
Except for Venezuela, population growth in the Pan Amazonian countries has fallen to between 1% and 0.5% per year, placing them in a group of countries that includes the United States, Canada and Spain. Brazil has the lowest rate, while Ecuador and Bolivia have the highest. Venezuela has complicated this panorama with its economic implosion, which has led to the mass migration of approximately seven million economic refugees between 2014 and 2023. Most have resettled in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, which show uncharacteristically high growth rates during those years.
Currently, the jurisdictions within the Pan Amazon are home to approximately 43 million people, up from twelve million in 1970 (Figure 6.1). Growth has occurred in a progressive, almost linear, fashion, but there was a major spike in the 1980s when net inflows ranged from 100,000 to 300,000 immigrants per year. If current trends continue, the Pan Amazon should have a total population of about sixty million by 2050 and stabilize at about 65 million by 2100. Birth rates in the Amazon are slightly higher than in non-Amazonian jurisdictions, but they follow national trends with about a twenty-year delay. Compared to other tropical forest regions, this is a very moderate demographic scenario and should bode well for the natural ecosystems of the Pan Amazon, as well as the human communities that make it their home.
These projections assume there will not be another mass migration into the region; nonetheless, the impact of past migration is evident. Data from Brazil’s 2010 Census shows that more than three million residents of the Legal Amazon were born in one of the other five macro-regions. In contrast, fewer than 400,000 Brazilian citizens born in the North now reside outside of the region, and most of them live in the adjacent states of Mato Grosso and Goiás. The census data does not capture second-generation immigrants, however; nor does it reveal migratory movements within the Amazon. Perhaps as much as two-thirds of the population of the Brazilian Amazon would fall into these two categories.
Indigenous people make up about 5% of the total population, a data point that does not include the Ribeirinha / Ribereña communities, who are descended from detribalized Indigenous people, or the Seringueiros, whose forebears were early migrants who pursued forest-based livelihoods, not unlike Indigenous communities. Environmental and social advocates often refer to these and other similar groups as ‘traditional peoples’ and often include them in policy initiatives that seek to conserve natural forest ecosystems in a fair and equitable fashion. The rest of the Amazonian population are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants who arrived after 1960, and now represent probably about 80% of the Amazonian population.
Banner Image: The Ribeirinho communities, located on the main course of the Amazon and Solimões rivers between Iquitos and Belém, can trace their demographic history back to the ethnic groups that inhabited the river and its tributaries before the arrival of European missionaries, as well as traders, soldiers, adventurers, rubber tappers, and runaway slaves who migrated to the floodplain over the past four centuries. Credit: © RocioChiappino / Shutterstock.
“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).
To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.
Chapter 6. Culture and demographic defines the present
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