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The human penetration of Amazônia is proceeding as the culmination, if not the climax, of the worldwide process of deforestation that has been accelerating over the past 5,000 years. So far, in the absence of major technological adaptations for more productive and rational settlement, the deforestation of Amazônia is taking place without yielding any important economic benefit to Brazil or to the world. In the past, the world’s forests had done far more. They had been a source of geopolitical power as well as of energy and critical materials. The French historian Fernand Braudel has written: "One of the reasons for Europe’s power lay in its being so plentifully endowed with forests. In the face of it Islam was in the long run undermined by the poverty of its wood resources and their gradual exhaustion." But Europe rapidly followed the pattern of deforestation that ran its course in the Middle East to meet the consumption demands of the Phoenicians and of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The European forests yielded their treasure between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries to the growing needs of industrialization: wood ash for glassworks and soapworks, firewood for salt evaporation, timber as props for mine shafts. The greatest consumers were shipbuilding for Europe’s imperial ventures and continental wars, which made access to timber a major strategic consideration, and for the production of pig iron. The exhaustion of England’s forests by the seventeenth century led to the importing of hardwoods for shipbuilding from the New World and India. It also led to the substitution of coking coal for charcoal in metallurgy, providing the source of cheap energy for England’s Industrial Revolution. A similar substitution of mineral coal for charcoal in making pig iron took place in China a thousand years earlier after the stripping of the forests of northern China between the sixth and ninth centuries A.D., leading to a rapid multiplication in the per capita output of iron. Likewise, deforestation has taken place in southern Brazil since the launching of the steel industry following World War II, with charcoal now being trucked to the steel mills of Minas Gerais over distances greater than 500 miles. While Brazil imports coal just as she does oil, however, no wholesale substitution for charcoal has taken place because of the lack of her own coking coal deposits, part of Brazil’s general deficiency in commercial fossil fuels. In the absence of an energy transition to meet the challenge of the oil crisis for sustaining a productive agricultural frontier, Brazil is in grave danger of depredation of her resources. Data from radar surveys have generated appraisals of the value of the standing crop of hardwood timber in Amazônia at one trillion dollars. But most of this timber is being burned to clear land because of the difficulties of transporting it to market, since rivers are the only access route and most of the hardwood logs are "sinkers" too dense to float. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAQ) estimates that 25,000 square miles of forest are being cleared annually in Latin America, most of this probably in Brazil. Alternate energy sources to sustain permanent settlement have not yet been developed from Amazônia’s natural resource potential, such as hydropower (including the production of hydrogen fuel through electrolysis) and the conversion of biomass. Even though dense forests now cover only about 30 percent of the earth’s land surface, they contain about 90 percent of the world’s living biomass. Scientists have argued that the process of deforestation is reducing the diversity in the genetic pool of living species. In the words of a leading tropical botanist: Biologists are generally agreed that much of the existing flora and fauna of the world, perhaps including man himself originated in the humid tropics. The rain forest for millions of years has served as a factory and storehouse of evolutionary diversity from which plants and animals able to adapt to more rigorous environments have migrated to populate the subtropical, temperate and colder regions. This role the tropical rain forest can play no longer: the destruction of forests and other ecosystems has already cut the lines of communication and made these migrations impossible. Even if the present, very reduced areas of rain forest were to be conserved, they could hardly play the same role as the much more extensive forest did earlier.... Sizable areas of rain forest still stand in Amazônia, Africa, Borneo, and New Guinea. It is likely that by the end of this century very little will remain. Under the pressure of human need, disorder, and speculation, urgent questions of utility and feasibility are arising as seed-bearing peoples travel along BR-364, and other routes of the frontier, to conquer the jungle. The Brazilian frontier’s importance to the world lies in knowing what lies "out there," what can be feasibly mined and farmed and transported, and what should be preserved in a natural state. Its importance lies in knowing, in short, what are mankind’s resource horizons in one of the last uncharted regions of discovery. These questions involve uncertainties of technological reach: the need for capital investments, new systems of production and distribution, and, most important, organizational capacity to develop and sustain new forms of human adaptation. Since World War II, Brazil has been more successful than perhaps any other developing country in absorbing into her economy an extraordinary range of industrial technology. The challenge of future decades, however, may involve a greater degree of innovation on her own. Learning what lies "out there" in Brazil’s backlands has engaged some of the world’s most sophisticated and most rudimentary surveying techniques. The large combat helicopters developed during the Vietnam War were quickly adapted to civilian use, greatly facilitating oil exploration and mineral prospecting in jungle areas. For the first time, geological field parties could reach Carajás, a remote cluster of Amazon plateaus in the state of Pará that has proved to have the largest high-grade iron deposit ever found. Carajás contains richer ores and six times the reserves of the now exhausted Mesabi Range of Minnesota, the main domestic source of iron for the United States, which ran the cycle from development to depletion in the first six decades of this century. The discovery in 1967 of Carajás and of the world’s third-largest bauxite deposit, Trombetas, on another set of jungle plateaus, propelled Brazil into Project Radam, the first systematic search and inventory of Amazônia’s resources, using techniques that have become available only over the past decade. The basic tool of Project Radam is aerial side-look radar scanning that was declassified by the U.S. Air Force in 1970. Since 1971, a specially equipped Caravelle jet plane, guided by a network of navigational radio transmitters on the ground, has been penetrating Amazônia’s almost perennial cloud cover to map and collect data on the soils, vegetation, water resources, and geology of 1.6 million square miles of jungle. Capable of surveying. up to 20,000 square miles daily, the plane directs a radar beam to one side of its flight path that strikes the ground at an angle. When the radar signal bounces back to the aircraft, data are received that indicate surface configurations and materials in the earth’s crust and discriminate among different kinds of soils and flora. Radam results are being collated with the findings of another high-technology survey, Landsat (formerly known as the Earth Resources Technology Satellite), an orbiting platform developed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that transmits data for photographic images to a ground station in northern Mato Grosso operated by the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE). The two systems are complementary. While radar penetrates clouds and vegetation to record topographical features, Landsat furnishes information beyond the range of what the human eye could see from space. For example, Landsat distinguishes between live and dead vegetation, since dead leaves do not reflect sunlight on the infrared spectrum. Thus Landsat could be used in determining the precise extent of the damage to the coffee crop caused by the 1975 frost in southern Brazil and in monitoring the extent of deforestation in Amazônia. Radam’s delineation of topography is fleshed out by Landsat data that can be interpreted to provide information on soil types, vegetation, and geology. Nevertheless, despite the prodigious flow of data from aerial and space surveying techniques, this information becomes valuable to the conquest of the Brazilian frontier only after it is amplified by the findings of people on the ground. Since 1971, Project Radam has set up and abandoned hundreds of base camps, with small landing strips, in remote parts of Amazônia. They exist for weeks or, at most, months at a time, depending entirely on logistical support from the Brazilian air force, before the tents, machinery, and crews of geologists, agronomists, forestry engineers, and laborers are flown out for another cycle of ground forays elsewhere in the jungle. From one of these base camps in northeastern Rondônia, where alluvial tin deposits were discovered by rubber gatherers two decades ago, Project Radam teams were exploring 80 jungle sites identified in promising radar and satellite images. By 7:00 A.M. each day, helicopters are flying to one or another of these sites. Four-man teams, with chain saws strapped to their backs, are lowered into the jungle by winches and slings descending from helicopters hovering above the tree tops. Within four or five hours, the crew has cleared half an acre of forest and laid a crude landing mat for the helicopter. On the same afternoon, technicians are landed in the clearing to explore the immediate area, noting fauna and taking samples of flora, rocks, and soils. Many more such sites have been reached by boat along jungle rivers. Plane crashes, boat accidents, and disease have killed 45 persons on these forays over the past 5 years. The technological prodigies of radar and satellite surveys of Amazônia seem to be climaxing a century of intensifying human exploration of the region by less sophisticated means, searching for minerals, rubber, and arable land, mainly by men on foot and in small boats. The great iron deposit of Carajás was found by a 15-man geological field party from U.S. Steel that was moving eastward along trends of ancient pre-Cambrian rock while looking for manganese and iron. Gene Tolbert, the chief geologist, had wanted to survey the area by plane first but could not find a bush pilot willing to fly into a region so remote and devoid of clearings or airstrips. In the course of reconnaissance flights, the pilots and geologists saw a cluster of previously unknown plateaus that were found to be covered with canga, a low-grade iron formation, extending over an area of several hundred square miles and capping several bodies of high-grade iron ore that, after an extensive drilling program, have proved to contain about 18 billion tons of high-grade iron ore. Rondônia’s alluvial tin deposits were found in much the same way. In 1951, small deposits of gold and diamonds were discovered on the slopes of the Serra dos Parecis in central Rondônia. These discoveries brought large numbers of nomadic miners, called garimpeiros, into the area, digging and panning in jungle streams with primitive techniques used for centuries in the Brazilian backlands. Some of the garimpeiros found precious metals, and others failed. Several of those who went bust, the blefados, asked for work at the rubber-collecting station of Joaquim Pereira da Rocha, who laid claim to one million acres of rubber-bearing forest along the Gy-Paraná River in central Rondônia. Rocha believed that his one million acres might contain diamonds. He hired some failed garimpeiros to prospect for him. Instead of diamonds, the garimpeiros brought back a heavy black sand that was sent to the United States for laboratory analysis. The black sand turned out to be cassiterite, the source of metallic tin. It was the first major tin discovery in the New World since the opening of the Andean mines of Bolivia at the beginning of the century. Some enthusiasts began comparing Rondônia’s alluvial tin deposits with those of Malaysia, the world’s leading producer. A mining boom had begun. By 1971, when the government expelled the garimpeiros from Rondônia to make way for the mechanized operations of large companies, there were said to be 45,000 people mining tin by hand along jungle streams. The busiest area was near Igarapé Prêto, 180 miles east of Pôrto Velho, where Project Radam later established one of its base camps. With a geological intuition born of long experience in prospecting for rare minerals in the pre-Cambrian shield areas of the South American land mass, the veteran garimpeiros and their younger helpers dug elaborate shafts and tunnels, often 20 or 30 meters deep, to follow the trends and undulations of the mineralized portions of granitic rock along and beneath the riverbeds. The manual garimpo mining operations would open and close, running a brief and frenzied cycle from discovery to depletion, with the fury of an Amazon deluge. Much of Rondônia’s mining boom wealth was siphoned away into the pockets of ore buyers and merchants, as well as the canteen owners and nomadic prostitutes who occupied little tent villages behind each mining camp, all of whose goods and services were extremely expensive in the isolation of the jungle. When the garimpeiros were expelled from Rondônia, they scattered to the winds. Some were flown north by the Brazilian air force to search for more tin and diamonds in the Amazon territories of Amapá and Roraima, near the Guianas. Others found their way to the diamond boom of the early 1970s at San Salvador de Paúl in the grassy highlands of southern Venezuela, where they staged a revolt against the extortion of local officials and forced the Venezuelan government to legalize their operations. I found Cicero Pereira 1,500 miles southeast of Rondônia, at a garimpo mining camp grafted upon one of the greenish gray buttes that rise abruptly from the scrub forests near the village of Nova Roma, in the northern part of Goiás State. When tin was discovered at Nova Roma in 1972, word was sent back to the displaced garimpeiros in Rondônia, who were still occupying a government camp just outside Pôrto Velho. Hundreds of them chartered buses for a journey of four days and nights across half of Brazil. Within a week they were producing tin at Nova Roma. Cicero Pereira is a lean, swarthy man in his early thirties, who, like many other migrants to Amazônia, came to Rondônia in 1958 from his native state of Ceará to cut rubber as a seringueiro after one of the biblical droughts of the Brazilian Northeast. "Many people left Ceará at that time, some went to one place, others to another," he told me. My first destination was the city of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon. I spent more than a month in Belém before leaving for Rondônia by steamboat. The journey up the Amazon and Madeira Rivers took 15 days. In Belém people told me that Rondônia was a good land and I went there to cut rubber. The job was to milk the liquid from the tree and to smoke it to make rubber. Although the seringueiro had entered the mata to cut rubber, he switched to digging for tin because it paid better. Rubber production almost died. At Igarapé Prêto there were 10,000 people working at the time the garimpeiros were expelled. There were 98 single-engine planes flying in supplies and flying out tin ore. Igarapé Prêto was an hour and 40 minutes’ flight from Pôrto Velho, and everything was done by airplane. All this lasted almost two years. Igarapé Prêto was discovered in 1969 and the companies took over on March 31, 1971. One day an official of the Ministry of Mines and Energy came to tell us that the government had a plan to replace manual mining with mechanized mining. He gave us a year to leave the place. Some garimpeiros didn’t believe it, while others rebelled. They didn’t understand laws. They were poor and ignorant people. After the garimpeiros were expelled, those who didn’t want to work for the companies went back to cutting rubber. Others of us went on to other places. The main objection to the garimpeiros’ operations was that their primitive techniques were capable of skimming only the highly concentrated cream of the tin-bearing cassiterite formations, leaving untouched the lower-grade material that, officials said, could be mined economically by mechanized dredges if the richer ore bodies were also included. The garimpeiros’ teams were replaced by mixed companies in which some of the leading names of the international tin industry participated managerially and financially: the Patiño interests, formerly of Bolivia, now based in Paris; W.R. Grace and National Lead of the United States; and Billinton of the Netherlands. It was widely predicted that Brazil not only would soon become self-sufficient in tin for her rapidly expanding industries, but also might become one of the world’s leading exporters. Tin production in Rondônia, however, has taken a long time to regain the level achieved by the garimpeiros. The expected tin bonanza has not materialized. The companies have passed the word that the mineralized alluvial beds are thinner than originally believed and that early estimates of Rondônia’s tin reserves were exaggerated. A foreign geologist who has prospected in the area for many years told me: The industry will be able to operate at a modest level for many years. With today’s high tin prices, we are able to dig gravel containing half a kilogram of tin per cubic meter. Only a short while ago, we couldn’t mine below a kilo per meter. We expect to be able to mine poorer ores as the price rises. The tin industry’s dampened hopes reflect some general conclusions of recent explorers of Amazônia that tend to contradict the traditional view of Brazilian nationalists that the tropical forest hides a cornucopia of natural resources that International Greed (Cobiça international) will wrest away from Brazil if she is not eternally vigilant. In 1973 a leading Brazilian journalist wrote: Exactly as the hour for Amazônia arrived, bringing the sound of trumpets of our coming victory over the so-called "Green Hell," intricate maneuvers and campaigns began to appear from inside and outside the country against construction of the [Transamazon] highway. They began with the suspected rumor according to which the highway and clearing of the forest would deprive humanity of oxygen and thus endanger the ecological balance of the earth. We do not plan, however, to give up one millimeter of our rights over a fabulous region which is exclusively ours.... We need nowadays the petroleum, the minerals, the water, the lumber, the rubber, and all of the other fascinating wealth which Amazônia has hidden for so many years almost as if they were being saved to serve us at the most propitious instant in our development. In the teeth of these claims, the explorations of recent years have severely eroded the mythology of Amazônia’s natural wealth. The myths could persist as long as the region’s resources were inaccessible and hidden by ignorance. So poorly known was Amazônia at the time of the Trans-amazon Highway construction in the early 1970s that agricultural colonies were created on jungle soils that turned into sand after deforestation. Some of the best land along the Transamazon now will have to be flooded, and thousands of colonists relocated, because of the lake to be formed behind the huge Tucurui dam being constructed on the Tocantins River. Because of ignorance of the terrain, construction of the highway was routed through areas that were under water for six months of the year. It crossed the same meandering river three times. One region designated as a national forest reserve turned out to be an open savanna. Project Radam discovered and mapped a major tributary of the Amazon, 500 miles long, that was previously unknown. Among the other prodigies of the high-technology surveys, geologists have found extensive underlying formations of volcanic rock, challenging some traditional interpretations of South America’s earth history. Radar images have led to the discovery of large deposits of limestone that could be used to neutralize the acidic soils of many plateau areas. In the westernmost state of Acre, Radam has located 40,000 square miles of thick topsoil beneath the rain forest, said to be capable of supporting intensive agriculture. While scientists previously believed that Amazônia consisted almost entirely of sandy or lateritic (iron-bearing) soils that are poor in nutrients, Radam prospecting has found that at least 2 percent of the region is covered by fertile soils. In an area of three million square miles, 2 percent is still quite a bit of land in absolute terms. The dispersion of these islands of fertility and the problems of logistical reach in bringing supplies to and marketing products from these areas, however, may impede large-scale commercial exploitation. The radar and satellite surveys of recent years, as well as the extensive reconnoitering of Amazônia in search of minerals, arable land, and botanical species, have contributed to a spectacular increase in knowledge of this vast region’s potential. However, as the information flows in, scientists are reaching the conclusion that, in a general way, the discoveries made recently in Amazônia have not added significantly to the world’s inventory of known natural resources. An exception is the huge iron deposit at Carajás. But the world seems well supplied for the rest of this century with more accessible sources of iron ore, including Brazil’s own Iron Quadrangle in the state of Minas Gerais. Oil prospecting has been disappointing. A geologist writing in the October 1927 issue of Foreign Affairs pointed to prospects of major oil finds in "a long belt extending from Colombia into Argentina along the east side of the Andes, an area the exploration of which cannot be expected for a period of years." A half century ago, many geologists felt the region east of the Andes might become the world’s third great oil province, after the Middle East and the circum-Caribbean crescent stretching from Texas to eastern Mexico and Venezuela. These hopes were supported by the discovery of a series of surface oil seeps and pitch lakes that appear on the island of Trinidad and in eastern Venezuela and continue to occur east of the Andes in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and northern Argentina. The region was also found to contain enormous beds of sedimentary rocks, in some places between 20,000 and 40,000 feet thick, the kind of formations in which most petroleum accumulations are found. In 1916, Standard Oil of New Jersey sent a confidential political agent to Peru to seek a trans-Andean railroad concession that would link the company’s oil fields on the Peruvian coast with the Marañon River in the Upper Amazon Basin, which was regarded as a prospective oil province. Although the railroad scheme fell through, Standard continued to send geological field parties into the jungle, probing the main tributaries of the Amazon as far south as the Madre de Diós River near the Bolivian border. In 1921, Standard bought some Bolivian oil concessions along the eastern slopes of the Andes. In view of the fear in United States government and industrial circles after World War I that domestic reserves were running out, a Standard executive said in a confidential memorandum that the Bolivian Concessions were acquired "for the assurance gained by holding large areas available for production in the distant future when the fields now in sight will either diminish or fail to supply the increased consumption." But the major oil companies’ presence in the South American interior to search for this new source of wealth aroused deep and enduring suspicion. The Argentine press, for example, portrayed Standard Oil and Shell as the real forces propelling Bolivia and Paraguay into the bloody Chaco War (1932-1935) as part of the companies’ rivalry for oil concessions; indeed, U.S. State Department documents subsequently revealed that Shell had provided financial guarantees for Bolivian arms purchases in London before the war. Similar suspicions surrounded the brief jungle war in which Peru wrested the Marañon region from Ecuador in the early 1940s. Meanwhile, Brazilian nationalists fanatically believed that dark and undefined conspiracies by the "oil trusts" were preventing discovery in Brazil of oil deposits fully in proportion to the country’s huge size. Projected into the future, the failure so far of exploration to make major oil discoveries in the sedimentary basins of Amazônia is likely to have important implications. The hopes for an undiscovered bonanza "out there" are being exchanged for the realization that mankind appears to be running out of large petroleum deposits on the continental land masses. Exploration is being pushed farther and farther out to sea, and the industry is being prodded to find substitutes for liquid hydrocarbons. However, while South America has the largest area of sedimentary basins of any continent, it is still relatively unexplored. During the entire history of the oil industry, South America’s 4.9 million square miles of basins have been probed by only about 12,000 exploratory wells, for about 51 million feet of drilling. By contrast, the lower 48 states of the United States, with only two-fifths of Latin America’s sedimentary area, have been tested by 45 times as many exploratory wells (540,000) cumulatively for nearly 1.8 billion feet of drilling. South America’s oil prospects will remain an enigma until many more wells are drilled, despite the high cost and miseries of exploring in rain forest areas that are under water much of the year. By the mid-1970s, some 40 state and foreign oil companies were exploring in 750,000 square miles of heartland area in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay. These companies are using far more sophisticated surveying and drilling techniques than were employed in the heyday of exploration in the United States. As in Project Radam and the discovery of Carajás, jungle oil exploration was aided greatly in the 1960s by development of large helicopters capable of carrying heavy drilling equipment into previously inaccessible areas. The helicopters made it possible for base camps and field parties to operate much deeper in the Amazon rain forest, away from the principal waterways to which test drilling was limited in earlier exploration efforts. The development of lighter and waterproof geophysical equipment enabled seismic survey crews to roam over wider areas to probe for potential oil-bearing structures. The data obtained on the ground was collated with results of the same side-look aerial radar scanning used in Project Radam. But the results so far have not been encouraging. A major discovery was made by Texaco-Gulf in the Ecuadorean jungle in the early 1960s, now producing more than 200,000 barrels daily, but this so far has been an isolated phenomenon. Smaller finds have been made in a nearby part of the Peruvian jungle and in eastern Bolivia, leading several companies to launch exploration drives that, until now, have yielded negligible results. Peru is building a $1-billion trans-Andean pipeline, which it lacks enough oil to fill, and nearly all the companies that started exploration in the Amazon jungle in the early 1970s have abandoned their efforts. The exploration, of the Brazilian portion of the Amazon Basin did not begin until after World War II. After Petrobrás was organized in 1954 as the government oil monopoly, Walter K. Link, the crusty chief geologist of Standard Oil of New Jersey who had had long experience elsewhere in Amazônia, was hired to establish an exploration department for the new company. In March 1955, euphoria swept Brazil as Petrobrás, following earlier leads, announced it had struck oil in commercial quantities at Nova Olinda, along the Madeira River in the state of Amazonas. The Nova Olinda wildcat, however, proved to be unique. Over the next 6 years, after spending $300 million for Amazon exploration, Link and his associates made no further discoveries. Despite the depth of sedimentary deposits along the Amazon River’s tributaries and delta, geologists and geophysicists were unable to find structural irregularities, such as faults and domes, in which petroleum accumulations are usually trapped. Amazônia is one of the world’s most geologically stable areas, containing in its geologic history little of the movement in the earth’s crust that creates oil-bearing structures. As Link explained to the World Petroleum Congress in 1961: "Regarding the question raised about rifts and cross-faults and all that kind of thing, we have been looking very hard for those things and have not been able to find them. In fact, the reason [we] did not say much about structures in the Amazon is because we don’t think they exist.... This great basin lies between two very stable land masses [the Guiana and Brazilian shields]. They have been stable ever since pre-Cambrian times. You can take a ruler or a protractor and start on the edges of the crystalline shields and draw lines 1.25 degrees from the north and from the south and they will meet in the middle of the basin and you’ll hit the basement right on the button from both sides. So that is one of the great problems in finding oil in the Amazon.... So there just does not seem to be any structure as we can determine to date, but we know there’s oil because we’ve had a few wells that produced 1,000 or 2,000 barrels of oil. .. I think we have tried everything that anybody has tried at any time during the entire history of all exploration, and will continue to do so." Link’s pessimistic view of oil prospects in the Brazilian Amazon, contained in a report to Petrobrás that was leaked to the press, made him an object of intense controversy in Brazil. He had recommended that Petrobrás concentrate its exploration efforts along the coast and in foreign areas where secure oil supplies might be developed. In response, Brazilian nationalists called Link a "saboteur" and a "tool of imperialists" secretly acting on behalf of the major oil companies that had been shut out of oil exploration in Brazil. Petrobrás, however, has since continued oil exploration in the Amazon without making any discovery that would refute Link’s geological analysis. In 1976, Petrobrás abandoned its drilling efforts in the westernmost state of Acre, Amazônia’s most promising area, to devote all its resources to offshore exploration. While the Brazilian frontier expanded rapidly in the era of cheap and abundant imported oil that fueled world economic growth after World War II, it is unlikely that Brazil can sustain this frontier with petroleum supplies from domestic sources. The acceleration of Brazil’s move into her backlands in the postwar period could not have happened without a dramatic reshaping and enlargement of her energy consumption patterns. As recently as 1946, 70 percent of her energy supply came from firewood and charcoal. By the early 1970s, the same proportion was coming from oil and hydroelectric power, while energy use as a whole had quadrupled. In other words, Brazil leaped from a wood-burning to an oil-driven economy in the course of a generation, an energy transition that Europe had taken three centuries to achieve. At the time of the fourfold increase in oil prices in 1973-74, Brazil was at the height of her economic "miracle," with an average annual 10 percent growth in GNP for the 1968-1974 period. By that time, she had developed the world’s ninth-ranking automobile industry and was on the threshold of becoming the first developing country to join the small group of industrial nations that produce more than one million vehicles a year. As the leading petroleum importer among developing countries, however, Brazil since 1973 has been forced to borrow heavily abroad to pay for the oil needed to keep her economy in motion. These loans have made Brazil the world’s leading borrower, bringing her foreign debt to a staggering $30 billion. Under these financial pressures, Brazil is being driven to adapt her energy budget to the new price of oil. She has already raised gasoline prices to nearly two dollars a gallon, embarked on a program to gradually substitute alcohol (made from sugar cane and manioc) for gasoline as a motor vehicle fuel, and has allowed the price of chemical fertilizers to rise by removing government subsidies to consumers. Much more radical measures will be needed, however, to sustain large-scale settlement of remote areas of the interior such as Rondônia. If a serious effort is made to sustain Brazil’s economic development in the final decades of this century, then special forms of invention and adaptation will have to be carried forward that go far beyond the mere importation of oil and standard industrial technology. Amazônia has two major natural resource assets for dealing with this challenge. The first is the region’s enormous hydroelectric potential. In the postwar period, Brazil has been carrying out the world’s largest hydroelectric-dam-construction program, roughly doubling her generating capacity every eight years since 1950. In the southwestern corner of the country, on the great Paraná River that forms Brazil’s boundary with the neighboring republic of Paraguay, Brazil is building (with acquiescence and profit-sharing by Paraguay) Itaipú, the largest hydroelectric project ever constructed anywhere, five times the size of Egypt’s Aswan Dam. When all 18 of its giant turbines start working in the mid-1980s, Itaipú will itself produce 12,000 megawatts of electricity daily, equal to more than half of Brazil’s present generating capacity. But even if one counts the contribution to be made by Itaipú, Brazil’s present capacity to produce electricity is dwarfed by the hydropower potential of the Amazon Basin, which has been estimated at nearly 80,000 megawatts. This enormous potential has remained virtually untapped because cheaper sites in southern Brazil, closer to the principal energy markets, have been able to meet the country’s electricity needs. Moreover, until recently, no technique had been developed for transmission of electricity over long distances, such as between Amazônia and São Paulo, without large power losses en route. The opening in 1970 of the Bonneville-Los Angeles power line along the length of the Pacific coast of the United States, however, made practical a new means of efficient long-distance transmission, using direct current. But the logistical and engineering problems of building and maintaining such a north-south power line from the Amazon Basin would be on the order of the Alaskan pipeline or of Colonel Rondon’s construction of the jungle telegraph line through what is now Rondônia at the beginning of this century. Given the growing scarcity of cheap electricity in the world, however, Amazônia’s hydropower potential is being seen as a future magnet to attract industries from other areas. Amazônia’s second major resource for adaptation to a changing energy economy is its prodigious photosynthetic productivity. Because the wet tropics are an extremely efficient natural medium for the conversion of sunlight into plant matter, Amazônia is a promising field for the application of simple techniques being developed to transform solar power into usable forms of energy. These techniques could spell the difference between developing a relatively self-sufficient energy economy for places like Rondônia and allowing the present wave of settlement to collapse, at the new price of oil, into an increasingly isolated and marginal archipelago of families and communities practicing subsistence agriculture under enormous economic and ecological difficulties. One promising process is biogasification, by which certain kinds of bacteria digest animal or plant matter in the absence of oxygen (anaerobic conditions) to produce methane, a natural gas that can be burned as fuel or to produce electricity. The waste residue of the bacterial digestion has fertilizer value and can be applied to the soil. Biogasification has been used since the 1930s, when it was developed in India, using animal dung, on a pilot basis. It was also used to provide power for U.S. sewage treatment plants. Widespread use only began following the rise in oil prices in 1973. Since then, however, it has spread rapidly throughout rural India, Taiwan, China, and South Korea, with the digester tanks being operated by individual families and villages, always using human and animal waste. In Amazônia, the use of dung as the main feed-stack for biogasification would be impractical because of the low density of animal biomass in the region. The extraordinary productivity of plant matter in the wet tropics, however, offers an alternate possibility. The river environment of the Amazon and its tributaries produce rich natural cultures of water grasses and other aquatic plants. The fuel potential of this kind of wild growth was demonstrated recently by experiments in Mississippi by NASA. Using water hyacinths, a plant native to tropical South America that now clogs many rivers in the southern United States, in experiments to remove trace metals from municipal sewage, NASA researchers found that the hyacinths not only thoroughly cleaned the water passing through sewage treatment ditches; the scientists reported that, because of their high protein, nitrogen, and mineral content, the hyacinths also show considerable promise as an organic fertilizer and an animal feed supplement. Even more important, they added: Water hyacinths can also be used to produce biogas containing 60-80 percent methane, which is a promising substitute for natural gas. Our research shows that 374 liters of biogas can be produced per kilogram of dried water hyacinth; its fuel value is 21,000 BTU per cubic meter, compared with 31,600 BTU for pure methane. A continuous supply of water hyacinths can be grown in domestic sewage lagoons where... they also perform a valuable anti-pollution function. A hectare of water hyacinths fed on sewage nutrients can yield between 0.9 and 1.8 tons of dry plant material per day. This biomass can produce 220-440 cubic meters of methane with a fuel value of 7-14 million BTU. In addition, the sludge that remains after fermentation is a useful fertilizer, because it retains most of the nitrogen, all of the phosphorus, and other minerals. With skillful engineering, the river towns and cities of Amazônia, such as Pôrto Velho and Vila Rondônia, thus could become self-sufficient in basic supplies of fuel and fertilizer. Such a biomass system probably could be built at a cost equivalent to the purchase and transport of one year’s supply of fuel oil to be burned for electricity in the town’s conventional thermal generator. The main engineering problem seems to lie in assuring a year-round water supply to keep the plants alive and reproducing along rivers that become nearly dry in the summer. Even if this scheme is successful, it would be confined largely to the riverine environment, where man has always been able to survive in relatively high densities in Amazônia, but not extend to the interior terra firma, away from the rivers, where problems of survival and development are greatest. For all the advance of human penetration in this century, the savannas and jungles of Brazil’s interior remain, in terms of economic development, something akin to the Great American Desert, as the region of the United States west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies was called until the late nineteenth century. The Great American Desert became a region of permanent settlement only after the introduction of such agricultural techniques as dry farming, barbed wire, and irrigation, which were revolutionary in their day. Similarly, stable and viable human occupation of the savannas of Brazil’s Central Plateau and the forests of Amazônia awaits another generation of agricultural invention and adaptation, as well as more social justice that may bring with it a greater degree of peace. Basically, the same bacteriological fermentation used to produce biogas can also be applied to enrich manioc with a higher protein content to enable this ubiquitous root crop, since prehistoric times the staple of South America’s tropical lowlands, to meet the dietary needs of a settled farming population. But will such inventions be developed and broadly applied? In the post-war era Brazil has been highly successful at what may be called managerial adoption of technology imported from abroad, both in the private and public sectors. What has been lacking, especially in agriculture, is a tradition of craftsmanship that advances technological adaptation by widespread practice and experimentation. This is the kind of tradition that enabled northwestern Europe, by the sixteenth or seventeenth century, to become the center of innovation in the world. On the expanding Brazilian frontier today, there is nothing like the proliferation of farmers’ newspapers, magazines, and almanacs in the American West that served as media for the spread of new ideas and the comparison of individual experiences in the nineteenth century. This difference again may be due to the instability and high concentration of land tenure in Brazil, as well as the widespread illiteracy in the farm labor force. In recent decades, Brazil has developed a small but capable body of scientists and has begun to carry forward agricultural research and extension work. Some of this work has been promising. But how effectively can the fruits of controlled experiments be diffused in a field of great social and ecological instability? The questions of husbandry, invention, and justice are the contingencies that will determine whether Brazil’s backlands again will become a hollow frontier, whether Brazil will continue to be a major food supplier to the world, and whether, in future decades, she will become a net provider or consumer in the world’s resource economy. They are questions in which an equilibrium between population and resources in the world hangs in the balance.
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BRAZIL
The
road to Rondônia is leading to the end of the primeval forest, whose
resource horizons are being changed and more clearly defined by Man. It is
not proving to be the cornucopia of limitless wealth once imagined. The
challenge of the Brazilian frontier is one of husbandry, ingenuity, and
justice, to extend the horizons of human life in the tropics beyond what
is currently feasible and to leave something for the future.