Human Modified Landscape News Today

Undesignated public land One of the objectives of the ZEE process was to assist the nations of the Pan Amazon to allocate their public lands among different constituencies and stakeholder groups. The group with the highest public profile, at least in recent years, is the Indigenous people who have organised a highly successful campaign to […]

Land-use maps and their explicit recommendations are most relevant on pioneer landscapes that are in the flux of change. Recommendations can provide sound information and support an expanding agricultural production system; more often, however, they are ignored in a frenzy of land speculation. This is, unfortunately, the case in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. Bolivia One […]

Regularizing land tenure on landscapes where private property predominates is more challenging than on landscapes occupied by communal landholdings. In part, this is due to their greater number, but the task is further complicated by the limited resources of their owners and the chaotic nature of frontier landscapes. The Censo Nacional Agropecuario of 2012 enumerated […]

The political movement that brought Evo Morales to power incorporated a latent conflict between highland and lowland Indigenous communities. The lowland nations are intent on recuperating their ancestral territories, which had been appropriated by families of European extraction or, more recently, allocated to timber companies as long-term forest concessions. The promise of recovering these lands […]

Bolivia was a leader in the agrarian reform movement in South America. A defining moment in its modern history was the national revolution of 1952, which started as an uprising against the feudal system that bound Indigenous communities to estates owned by wealthy families. The revolutionary government created the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA) […]

The most lucrative agricultural system in the Amazon is neither soy nor palm oil, but coca leaf, which is cultivated for both legal and illegal markets. There are two species, Erythroxylum coca, which is grown at higher elevations and is preferred for the legal market, and Erythroxylum novogratenensis, which is cultivated at lower elevations and […]

Cacao (Theobroma cacao) is native to the Amazon rainforest and has been cultivated and consumed throughout the Americas since before Columbus. Cacao can be broadly segregated into to contrasting types based on quality: bulk cacao is used for most candy and food products, and fine cacao is preferred for speciality chocolates. There are dozens of […]

Colombia Colombia is Latin America’s largest producer of palm oil, with nearly 450,000 hectares (1.1 million acres) of oil palm plantations in 2020, with another 100,000 immature plantings that will expand production by about 20 per cent over the next few years. The sector generated approximately $US 5 billion in gross revenues in 2019 and […]