Forced to Destroy
About the only way you can begin farming is to burn. Why? Lacking tens of thousands of dollars needed for heavy-duty land-clearing equipment, lacking roads to get the machinery there, pioneers like you are reduced to small power tools, and more frequently to axes and saws.
Armed with saw and ax, the pioneer who confronts the emerald jungle maze compares to young David attacking Goliath. Vines here often fall 100 feet from branch to jungle floor. Tangled brush is so thick a man can't force his way through without a bolo knife. Giant green trees jut high above massive and protruding, gnarled roots. Jungle growth is so lush and dense that even after all is slashed down, the farmer has no land to work on! He has a great brown-green mat several feet thick between him and the soil. His easiest and usual recourse is to BURN.
What is left after burning off the jungle is "the poorest soil known outside of the world's frank deserts" (Science News, March 29, 1969. Emphasis ours throughout). Soil in Amazonia is deceptive in its "richness." And, worse yet, you soon unintentionally destroy whatever richness exists. You, the pioneer, are practically forced to destroy the soil — the very thing you need most! Burning destroys mycorrhiza and other soil life. The pioneer who burns is on his way to destroying himself! And land clearers are burning here — have no doubt. So much so that in Colombia's Amazon, pilots often have to fly 20 to 30 minutes on instruments through farmer's smoke!
"Too bad," you say, "but couldn't other ways of clearing the land be used?" Probably true, but one way or another ground must be cleared, or crops can't receive enough sunlight to grow. And that brings us to the most serious agriculture problem of all Amazonia. The problem, for that matter, of most all potential breadbaskets such as the Niger River, the Volta basin, and the Ganges-Brahmaputra. This is the laterite cycle.
Rain Brings Ruin
Years ago when geographer-mathematician Thomas Malthus foresaw today's population outgrowing all food supply, optimistic visionaries and Don Quixotes hastily pointed to vast, undeveloped tropic jungles as the solution. Surely the rich, lush growth would produce limitless tons of food.
. . . Or at least, so everyone wanted to believe.
Recently, love of investigation and population pressure have driven scientists into the green wilds of scattered tropical areas in search of new lands to farm. Armchair philosophers smugly awaited glorious scientific pronouncements of a future breadbasket.
What a crushing, disappointing shock awaited them.
Remember that any healthy, fertile soil has a good supply of minerals. And most jungle soils have those vital mineral and chemical supplies. But sadly, those minerals have one relentless, DEADLY ENEMY.
Tropical RAIN.
Rain, rain and more rain! Driving, pounding, splattering, soaking, drenching RAIN. Up to 200 inches a year in some areas. Always a yearly average of from 80 to 100 inches in Amazonia. We have seen it. We have been in it.
Those incessant tropical showers erode, wash away, leach out many of life's basic elements: potassium, iron, calcium, magnesium, aluminum. But that's not all.
Dejected scientists emerge from the "green mansions" with a dismal report. Five brief years of pounding tropical rain hardened the cultivated soil beyond use — BEYOND HOPE! In technical terms, "the end product of excessive leaching is a soil of iron and aluminum oxides and quartz, invariably acidic, deficient in bases, low in plant nutrients, and intensely weathered to great depths."
This fatal soil-hardening, plant-destroying process is termed "laterization."
Brick, hardpan in the jungle?
Hard to imagine, we know!
Yet "hardpan" is hardly the word for it.
Tropic soil actually leaches out after a few years into brick. Some famous temples of the "lost civilization of Khmer" (modern Cambodia) were built of bricks quarried from former fields — land turned to laterite. Jungle farms evolved (into) agricultural corpses. Those temples are still standing, nearly 1000 years later! The Khmer civilization of Southeast Asia died out, somewhat mysteriously. Part of that mystery is no doubt solved by what science recently discovered about the leaching cycle in the tropics. The unfortunate people of Khmer had cleared, burned and farmed themselves right out of farmland, right out of existence!
In the Western Hemisphere, and closer in type to Amazonia, we have another mute testimony to the killing power of the laterite cycle. Ever hear of the Maya (Maya-Itza) civilization of the Yucatan? Masters of astronomy and the calendar, conquerors of the Mexican jungles, admirable builders of possibly the greatest early civilization of the Americas, they also mysteriously dropped from the pinnacles of success, declined and degenerated into a weak and stunted race, easily conquered by the invading Spaniards.
What caused the strange, unexplained decline?
All the answers are not available, but a definite factor was the old enemy, the laterite cycle. Ancient Mayans could not break the disastrous cycle of rain, leaching and laterization.
As American geologist T.H. Holland quipped, "Laterization might be added to the long list of tropical diseases from which not even the rocks are safe."
Laterite in Amazonia?
The dead civilizations of Yucatan and Cambodia are not in South America. Is there laterite soil in Amazonia? Sad to say — and as conscientious reporters and readers we must face the facts — YES.
The fact is, the Amazon basin — most of its two and one half million square miles — is shot through with laterite-forming soil.
Of course Amazonia is covered now with green jungle. The soils here are just lateritic, and not pure laterite — not yet! But within five to ten years of being cleared, land here would be nothing but brick. The proof is real. The proof lives in such places as lata. There, in mid-Amazonia, the Brazilian government set up an agricultural colony. Hopeful agriculturalists wrenched a clearing from the rain forest, planted crops and harvested a good yield. But what had appeared to be a rich soil, with a promising cover of humus, disintegrated after the first or second planting. In less than five years the cleared fields became virtually pavements of rock. Today Iata is a drab, despairing colony which evidences the killing power of the laterite cycle.
Perhaps you are beginning to understand why scientists say "the Amazon is a mock paradise and A FRAUD" (Georg Borgstrom, The Hungry Planet, p. 238; Christopher Weathersbee, Science News, March 29, 1969).
What appears to be a fabulously rich soil proves to be 'poverty-stricken. In five years or less, cleared fields become like cement. Asians are still paving their roads with laterite soil. Amazon farmers still move from patch to patch (the milpa system), innocently assuming the jungle will grow back. But contrary to popular belief, the jungle in laterite areas does not always grow back. Large areas that have been cleared for plantation cultivation are often permanently lost to agriculture after a few crop cycles have worn out the soil.
Modern technology may, sometime in the future, solve these problems. But the average pioneer cannot.
Other Possibilities Explored
If agriculture in Amazonia falls short of "breadbasket dreams," why not explore other possibilities, other potential riches? Fine! To be sure, Amazonia offers potential in other areas besides agriculture. For example, some believe commercial fisheries and cattle raising will prove successful. But scientists, businessmen and government officials have explored these food-producing schemes. Let's lay aside high-sounding dreams and analyze what these experts have found.
FISHERIES: At present, fishing in Amazonia is largely undeveloped. Saltwater fish come many miles up the Amazon as the ocean tide rolls in, and fresh-water fish are found beyond the mouth of the Amazon, still swimming in the powerful Amazon current which carries a hundred miles out to sea. There are manatee (mammals about 8' long) and of course the industrially processed fish tambaqui and the pirarucu which often weigh 200 pounds, not to mention the deadly piranha.
Obviously fishing could be increased. However three major difficulties stand in the way of the Amazon's feeding fish to all the world. First, the supply of edible types is not all that great. Secondly, quantity is not superabundant. Thirdly, the variety is bewildering, and the array of species makes marketing difficult. Processing, packaging, storing and transportation are all serious problems here, since spoilage begins immediately in this intense humid heat.
STOCK RAISING: Though the Brazilian consulate estimates its present cattle herds in Amazonia at 4 million (about 700,000 head on the MarajO Island alone) cattle raising here has not been what one might hope. The apparent "natural cattle country" is south of Amazonia in central Brazil, on grassy savannas called cam pos. Unfortunately the cameos provide pastures which are "highly seasonal and in addition seriously deficient in minerals (lime and other key plant nutrients). They also decline rapidly under the impact of permanent grazing. The animals in these pasture herds usually become smaller and smaller in body size with each succeeding generation, and new blood has to be brought in constantly from outside." (The Hungry Planet, Georg Borgstrom, p. 306)
Of course more cattle can be raised, and fishing can be increased. But the cold fact is that increase in these industries is falling seriously behind population growth in Brazil alone — much less the rest of the world!
Conclusion
Amazonia is a giant. This giant, to serve man, requires vast, sweeping and costly development. That development is desperately needed, since the world adds over 190,000 people per day — over 70 million every year. Will the Amazon feed Brazil? Will the old "green hell" feed the world?
Not until ambitious, grandiose projects are undertaken, and are successful. And not until fabulous sums of money are put to work in the right places.
Ambitious Amazon projects are not necessarily condemned to failure, but they are doomed to delay. As Mr. Jose Wady Abuyaghi of Brazil's Ministry of the Interior has told us, "Opening up the Amazon is not the work of one generation — rather THREE TO FOUR GENERATIONS!" That means 60 to 120 years, depending on your definition of generation! But mass famines and starvation are predicted within the next 5 to 15 years.
Will then Amazonia feed the world? Not in time to save starving millions. And certainly not in our lifetime.
If the world is to find and develop an international breadbasket, it will have to look elsewhere. Amazonia is not the answer.