Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has deployed military troops, light tanks, missile-equipped patrol boats, and armored carriers to the Guyanese border in what appears to be a brazen threat to claim…
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…
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…
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.…
The agricultural producers of the Amazon have access to radically different levels of credit depending upon national policies, the willingness of each country’s financial services industry to engage rural populations…
Sustainability initiatives have been organised for most of the agricultural commodities of the Pan Amazon, including palm oil, soy and beef, but also for coffee and cacao. Several of these…
The most lucrative agricultural system in the Amazon is neither soy nor palm oil, but coca leaf, which is cultivated for both legal and illegal markets. There are two species,…
Many of our staple food products are highly dependent on industrial agriculture and global supply chains, but small farmers in the Amazon continue to produce foodstuffs for their families, local…
Cacao (Theobroma cacao) is native to the Amazon rainforest and has been cultivated and consumed throughout the Americas since before Columbus. Cacao can be broadly segregated into to contrasting types…
There are two major cultivated species of coffee: arabica (Coffea arabica) and robusta (Coffea canephora), each with a multitude of varieties adapted to a broad range of ecological conditions. Arabica…
Colombia Colombia is Latin America’s largest producer of palm oil, with nearly 450,000 hectares (1.1 million acres) of oil palm plantations in 2020, with another 100,000 immature plantings that will…
Oil palm is highly suited to cultivation in the ecological and climatic conditions of the tropics and its cultivation in South America has expanded steadily over the last three decades.…
The cultivation of soy and maize has brought additional benefits to the farm economy in Mato Grosso because it has increased the supply and affordability of feed rations for livestock…
The soy/maize supply chain is dependent on the existence of privately owned logistical facilities that are essential for receiving, drying and storing soy and feed grains post-harvest. Without silos, the…
Because soybeans are annuals, soybean prices can vary sharply over relatively short periods of time. Farmers can choose to expand soy cultivation when prices are ‘good’, which eventually leads to…
The most important production system in the Pan Amazon when measured by GDP is the cultivation of annual crops: particularly soy, but also maize, rice, sorghum, wheat and cotton. In…
Beef production technology in all other Amazonian regions lags Brazil except for Bolivia, which has largely adopted the Brazilian approach to beef production. Bolivian producers can be classified into two…
Earlier this month, the leaders of eight countries in South America signed the Belém Declaration, billed as a landmark step towards saving the Amazon Rainforest. But it was criticized for…
Brazil is both a massive producer and consumer of beef. Domestic consumption has expanded steadily year on year with slight variations linked to periodic recessions, but most of the recent…
Packing plants are important to producers because the construction of a modern facility will stimulate the growth and diversification of the livestock sector. Modern packing plants must be located on…
The single largest cause of deforestation in the Pan Amazon is the clearing of forest to establish cultivated pasture to produce beef cattle. By some estimates, as much as eighty…
Highway infrastructure initiates the deforestation process, but it is almost always accompanied by some sort of agricultural activity. Depending upon circumstances, deforestation can proceed rapidly or slowly, lead to large…
The increasing presence of Chinese companies in South America has become an issue of concern among social and political analysts. Security specialists argue they are a geopolitical threat to the…
The modification of the rivers in Brazil has been driven by energy development, but investment in dams has the potential of creating an economically attractive option for shipping Brazil’s farm…
The past two decades saw a massive increase in hydropower across the Pan Amazon. The Brazilian government has scaled back investment in mega-scale hydropower projects but continues to pursue development…
The recent history of hydropower in Ecuador is similar to that described for Bolivia and Peru, particularly with respect to its recent expansion and the predominance of D&T systems that…