Re: The Amazon River Forest deromanticized

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2000 13:43:38 -0500
> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: The Amazon River Forest deromanticized
>
> >From a review of Nigel J. H. Smith. The Amazon River Forest - A Natural
> History of Plants, Animals, and People. New York and Oxford: Oxford
> University Press, 1999

A good starting point for understanding the Human ecology of the Amazon.
However, it must be said that the Amazon has already a long history of
Human occupation behind it, beggining at leat with the first colonial
settlings in the XVIIth century, where Jesuits organized forcibly tribal
communities as gatherers of various spices, passing on to the rubber
fever of the late XIXth and early XIXth century, and finally to the
development and deforestation of the 1970s on.

I should say that the ribeirinhos fishermen that inhabit the seasonal
lacustrial system on the borders of the Amazon and its affluents are
mostly a *semi-proletarian* stratum of workers, since they need money to
purchese various industrial commodities they cannot live without (salt,
cloths, plastic nets, oil for fishing ships, plastic nets, hookers,
lines, sinks, etc.). For suuply of these commodities they depend of
travelling salsmen, the *regatões*, who sell them these commodities in
exchange for fish. The fish, however, must be preserved to stand the
Amazon heat, and only the regatões have boats with freezing-chambers
necessary to make the ice that the ribeirinhos use in boxes for
preserving fish for short time spells before the reagatões come to buy
it; therefore, the regatões are also called today *geleiros* (icemen).
Actually, the regatões can buy all the fish they want at prices set by
them, since the ribeirinhos do not have the means to preserve fish until
they temselves reach the regional markets; also, the regatões sell the
ice and others commodities as an advance on future peurchases of fish
from the ribeirinhos, who are, naturally, ruthless exploited and work in
a condition similar to that of debt-laden serfs.Therfore, the
ribeirinhos *do* tend to overfish, and by so doing pose another threat
to the regional ecology (in the past, the same ribeirinhos have tended
to overkill any land animals with commercial value, and it is to be
noted that today's Amazon is very scarce in big game such as manatees,
crocodiles, caimans, capybaras, and the like). The history of ecological
manaces to the Amazon is, in short, to be considered as part of the
history of class struggle in the Amazon.

Carlos Rebello

 Although he is in favor of "community resource
> management" projects being set up in the region with the help of several
> outside actors, Smith states correctly that many of these outside actors
> have "*tended to assume that communities are anti-capitalist, when in fact
> there is little evidence of this in the Brazilian Amazon. On the contrary,
> I have yet to meet a family of farmers or fisherfolk not interested in
> making money" (p. 159).