The Colonization of the Amazon
Author: Anna Luiza Ozorio de Almeida
List Price: $30.00
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ISBN: 0292711468
Publisher: Univ of Texas Press (1992)
Sales Rank: 1,434,097
Average Customer Rating: 5 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Do not pass by this one!
I worked as a research assistant under the late Anna Luiza in the early ninety-nineties, and one of my first chores was to revise the Portuguese original of this book, which is the by-product of a (very) throughly reasearch about the role of deforestating in the strategies of capital accumulation of small planters practcising slash-and-burn agriculture in the borders of the Amazon rainforest. Ozorio de Alamida's team simply took down note of _all_ yearly expenses and revenues of the small farmers included in the sample, in order to arrive at the conmclusion that, in the absence of a coherent public policy of funding, the only alternative for such small producers is to buy a forest plot and to deforestate it entirely _in order to resell it as pasture land_ and then to repeat this same move three to four times before eventually managing to settle down in a stable plot of their own. To all those who don't content themselves with sentimental generalizations, but want to have hard (and, I have to admit, dry)actual economic information about what is going on behind an ecological disaster. Due to the fact of Anna Luiza's untimely death in 1994, she is not here to discuss her work, and I wanted to advise all interested in the plights of the Amazon not to pass by this fine work.
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