A recent report has revealed a spike in deforestation in the buffer zone of one of the world’s best-protected areas, Peru’s Amarakaeri Communal Reserve. Between 2001 and 2023, 19,978 hectares…
A paper trail left by a notorious land grabber reveals how he used relatives and an employee as fronts to evade environmental fines and lawsuits, shedding light on this widespread practice in the Brazilian Amazon.
Indigenous organizations from Peru and Brazil are joining forces to push their respective governments to safeguard a 16-million-hectare (39.5-million-acre) territorial corridor in the Amazon that stretches from the Tapiche River…
Roosevelt said the recent hype regarding the “garden cities” in Ecuador is “annoying”, as it is not a new discovery and it ignores older research from Latin American archaeologists.
Tasso Azevedo, one of the creators of Tropical Forests Forever, details the financial instrument envisaged to reward conservation.
Mineral extraction is a major cause of contention among the inhabitants of the Pan Amazon. Thousands of families depend on economic activity that originates, directly or indirectly, from the mining…
One of the benefits of agroforestry and plantation forestry is the ability of tree crops to capture and store carbon in their above-ground biomass. Although they must be renovated (cut…
There are three fundamental rules of financial planning: (1) save continuously, (2) invest in a diversified portfolio of assets and (3) exercise patience via a long-term strategy. This common-sense advice…
As infrastructure projects and soy plantations pump up land values in the Brazilian Amazon, smallholders are selling up and moving to more distant frontiers, perpetuating a cycle of displacement and deforestation.
The agro-industrial farms of Mato Grosso are among the most efficient on the planet; they benefit from abundant rainfall and a long rainy season, which allows them to plant and…
The creation of protected areas and Indigenous reserves offers the best hope for conserving the biodiversity of the Amazon; however, the management of the human modified landscapes will determine whether…
Undesignated public land One of the objectives of the ZEE process was to assist the nations of the Pan Amazon to allocate their public lands among different constituencies and stakeholder…
Ecuador The territorial planning framework in Ecuador is known as the Plan de Desarrollo y Ordenamiento Territorial (PDOT). It is one component in an ambitious effort to articulate a Plan…
Ocean rise and changes in the Amazon River are ruining the way of life in an archipelago close to where the Amazon River runs into the Atlantic.
Land-use maps and their explicit recommendations are most relevant on pioneer landscapes that are in the flux of change. Recommendations can provide sound information and support an expanding agricultural production…
Regulating land tenure is not the only power available to the state for influencing how people use land. Land-use planning and land-use zoning are two closely related mechanisms that Pan…
The sharecropping system that defined land tenure in the Ecuadorian highlands prior to agrarian reform was known as the ‘huasipungo’, a Quechua word that describes the relationship between landlords and…
A new amendment to Peru’s forest and wildlife law is being criticized by opponents as unconstitutional and a step backward in forest protection after it came into effect Jan. 10…
The agrarian reform process in Peru began in 1964. Originally a cautious effort targeting the more egregious examples of peasant exploitation, it was dramatically expanded by a left-wing military government…
Regularizing land tenure on landscapes where private property predominates is more challenging than on landscapes occupied by communal landholdings. In part, this is due to their greater number, but the…
The political movement that brought Evo Morales to power incorporated a latent conflict between highland and lowland Indigenous communities. The lowland nations are intent on recuperating their ancestral territories, which…
Bolivia was a leader in the agrarian reform movement in South America. A defining moment in its modern history was the national revolution of 1952, which started as an uprising…
Pensar Agro (“thinking agribusiness”), or IPA, lobbied hard for newly passed legislation like the so-called time frame bill that undermines Indigenous land rights and opens up the territories to mining.
The need to fast-track the regularização of smallholder titles motivated the Terra Legal programme, which sent teams of surveyors to selected municipalities to accelerate the process for landholdings established prior…
The third pillar of the institutional mission of the Instituto Nacional de Colonização y Reforma Agraria (INCRA) encompasses both administrative and legal aspects of land tenure and, as such, is…
An unprecedented time-series study in the basin of the Tapajós River, a major tributary of the Amazon, assesses the level of degradation of small rivers threatened by agribusiness expansion.
Rural real estate markets in the Pan Amazon are regulated by institutions that are a legacy of the agrarian reform movements that played a prominent role in domestic politics during…
The adage ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’ is not legally true, but the concept reigns supreme on frontier landscapes in the Pan Amazon. Land grabbers and peasant pioneers share…
New roads open wilderness landscapes to development, and commodity markets drive the expansion of the agricultural frontier. These two causes of deforestation are at the centre of deforestation policy discussions.…
After winning a historic lawsuit, an Indigenous community in Ecuador has finally obtained legal ownership of its land in a protected area — 80 years since being forcibly displaced. According…