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What do you know of Amazon?

There is intense deforestation and environmental degradation

Amazon rainforest area is one-and-a-half times the size of India, did you know?
Brazil’s government hopes that land reform in the Amazon will slow deforestation. Greens lobby doubt it

The Ticuna, Amazon’s big river runs  near Brazil’s borders with Colombia and Peru. Rubber drew the Amazon into the list of hinterlands that could be tapped if supplies were tight elsewhere, allowing growth to accelerate in much of the world from the 19th century onwards. And today new demands on the Amazon’s riches will determine the future of the forest.

About 900 miles (1,500km) downriver to the east, in Amazonas state, stands Manaus. Rubber barons built the city from the 1860s onwards. Its early residents made up for their distance from the European centres of fashion by trying to outdo Paris. Now Manaus’s Zona Franca is the workshop for most of the televisions, washing machines and other white goods sold in Brazil. Special arrangements allow firms such as Sony and LG to import parts tax-free from elsewhere in the world and assemble them there. Despite being surrounded on all sides by thick forest, Manaus hums with manufacturing.

Some 350 miles to the south-east, in Pará state, the high gold price has encouraged a few hundred garimpeiros, or wildcat miners, to follow rumours of a strike and trek for days through the forest. They live in shacks with tarpaulins to keep off the rain, digging square holes and sifting through the red soil in the hope of finding a seam of gold.

Soyabean
South by 400 miles, in Mato Grosso state, the Amazon meets the agricultural frontier. Much of the world’s growing demand for protein is satisfied here. The state, which was once thought to have poor farmland, has been transformed over the past few decades and is now the country’s biggest producer of soyabeans for vegetable oils and cattle-feed. The forest in the state shrank by 105 square miles in the three months from November to January, according to the Brazilian Space Research Institute, which uses satellites to monitor deforestation.

All these places are part of the Amazon rainforest, an area one-and-a-half times the size of India, or nearly eight times the size of Texas. Most of it lies within Brazil.

It is home to 20m Brazilians, or 10% of the country’s population. Many of them live a hard existence in places that are hot, wet, often disease-ridden and sometimes dangerous. These people have gone from being heroes who answered the government’s call to populate and subdue an empty region, to environmental criminals who are wrecking the planet, all the while standing on the same spot and doing what they have done for decades.

No government would think of condemning so many voters to persistent poverty in the name of saving trees. Moving them is impractical and would be unjust, since the state moved them in the first place, under a policy that began in the 1960s and lasted for 20 years.

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