Limits of boom-and-bust development: challenge of the Amazon

"WE KNOW that as Brazil goes, so will go the rest of that Latin American continent," said Pres. Richard Nixon in 1971 while lavishing praise on Gen. Emilio Garastazu Medici, perhaps the least charming of Brazil's 20-year parade of military presidents--and so, in certain grisly respects, it did. The militarization of Brazil in 1964 was not an aberration, but a harbinger. In Latin America during the years that followed, one constitutional government after another fell victim to military coups.

Brazil also led the trend toward redemocratization, with its abertura, or opening, for free expression and free assembly during the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, its leadership potential became ever more apparent, portending independent foreign policies and competition, rather than complementarity, with the U.S. and the First World in manufacturing and trade.

Today, Brazilian independence has been tempered by mega-debt and hyper-inflation and the consequent denationalization of decision-making on the most essential elements of economic policy. Over the longer term, the country's independence also has been tempered by a persistent inclination to boom-and-bust development, with the booms fleetingly enriching mostly non-nationals, or at least non-locals, while the busts impact enduringly on plundered regions and communities.

This boom fever has zeroed in again in the last decade of the 20th century on the Amazon--the country's mineral-rich heartland and its last frontier. With this threat to the world's largest rain forest, however, also comes opportunity. A new generation of nationalists is joining forces with foreign environmentalists in drawing attention to the fact that this great river basin is worth more to Brazilians, and to the rest of the world, as a rain forest than a source of depletable riches for a few. Brazil now has the prospect of taking the lead in demonstrating that environmental sanity serves national as well as global interests.

Brazilian leaders, military or civilian, always have looked lustfully and anxiously at the Amazon Basin, fearing that if their nation did not explore, develop, and settle that region, it would lose those riches to neighbors. Until the middle of this century, however, such concerns had little material consequence. The beginnings of the contemporary assault on this new frontier might be traced to the building of the new capital, Brasilia, by the government of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61) in the undeveloped interior state of Goias. A road linking Brasilia with Belem bisected the Amazon Basin and opened up the area to settlers and fortune-seekers.

The pace quickened in the 1960s, as the military government established the Superintendency for the Development of the Amazon and began the construction of the Transamazonic Highway. The population of Manaus has doubled to more than 1,000,000 since 1967, when it was declared a free-trade zone. Ranching, logging, and public and private mining ventures also have been undertaken increasingly since the 1960s and at a pace rapidly accelerating since the beginning of the 1980s. Such ventures call, in turn, for more massive infrastructure projects--roads, bridges, and dams. The joint public-private enterprise venture, Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD), the world's largest iron mine, carved out an estate in Goias that continues to grow, voraciously consuming trees and water to maintain its energy needs.

During the mid 1970s, the government began to offer incentives for clearance of the rain forest, a ploy that simultaneously offered tax shelters to major corporations and appeared to constitute an alternative to desperately needed and fiercely resisted land reform. The offers drew large numbers of peasants displaced by drought in the Northeast and mechanization in the Southeast. Most have found, after inordinate investment of time and labor, that the leached soils respond very poorly to farming and not much better to grazing. Worse still, land titles in areas already or about to be cleared have been drawn poorly, with overlapping, underlapping, and outright fraud making it easier for major landholders or speculators to push peasants off the lands they had cleared.

A frontier free-for-all

By the 1980s, this frontier free-for-all had produced hundreds of deaths and a land concentration pattern comparable to parts of the country settled centuries earlier. The ejected peasants, lacking options, have become an itinerant labor force, primarily located in instant slum towns on the margins of the land they had cleared. Reconcentration also has meant food shortages, since 80% of the crops have been produced by holders of small plots. Major landholders were more likely to be engaged in export agribusiness. Even so, since the soil is so infertile, they often have earned more from tax write-offs than from anything cultivated. Forest clearance incentives were revoked in 1987, in response to international pressures, but speculation in land continues to be fueled by hyperinflation.