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 2022 documentary “The Territory” won an Emmy award this January, shining a light on the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous people and the invasions, conflicts and threats from land grabbers in their territory in the Brazilian Amazon from 2018 to 2021.
Both El Niño and climate change contributed to the lack of rainfall in the region, but climate change also led to extremely high temperatures and increased water evaporation.
With reduced support in Brazil’s Congress following the 2022 elections, the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been unable to prevent the passage of bills dismantling environmental safeguards in favor of agribusiness interests.
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…
One of the final stages in demarcating the Amazonian territory of the isolated Kawahiva tribe is set to take place this year, Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples has announced. It’s…
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 Surucuá community in the Brazilian state of Pará is the first to receive an Amazonian Creative Laboratory, a compact mobile biofactory designed to help kick-start the Amazon’s bioeconomy.
Water bodies across the Brazilian state of Roraima have shrunk in area by half over the past 20 years, according to research from the mapping collective MapBiomas.
Study finds Earth could reach 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2040 and shows regional climate variables in fine detail. These findings, along with others, are very worrying for the Brazilian Amazon.
There is only limited potential for finance to change agricultural practices in the Andean Amazon, because landscapes are largely populated by smallholders who are notoriously risk-adverse in how they manage…
This is a critical moment for the most damaging infrastructure project in the Amazon. On Monday, December 18th, a proposed law (PL 4994/2023) was put on the plenary agenda of…
Both Lula and the Supreme Court have previously called the measures in the bill unconstitutional and against public interests, and Indigenous organizations announced they will challenge the law.
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…
Five policy briefs released at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai call for urgently protecting the Amazon Rainforest from degenerating into a dry savanna, providing insights about what drives destruction…
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…
This year’s COP28 kicked off in Dubai on Nov. 30 and saw Amazonian countries arriving with a string of environmental triumphs since the last climate summit hosted in Egypt. While…
A severe drought across the Amazon Rainforest continues to be felt along the Tapajós River in Brazil’s state of Pará, where locals say it “is the worst one ever.”
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,…
Between 15 and 18% of the least-studied areas in the Brazilian Amazon are at high risk of severe climate and land-use changes by 2050, research has shown, meaning we could…
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…
One of Brazil’s largest states is ramping up efforts to monitor cattle ranching in the hopes of combatting deforestation and reducing carbon emissions. A new traceability program will keep tabs…
The Sawré Muybu Indigenous Territory is in the final stages of getting state protection, but previous right-wing administrations delayed demarcation.
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…