Suchergebnisse

Concern over the fate of the rain forest and peoples of Amazonia has inspired a renewed interest in the extraction of natural products from the region. Accounts of the Amazon Rubber Boom (1860–1910) are of particular interest in view of the dominance of the rubber industry during one of the most influential periods in the region's history as well as the continuing economic importance of wild rubber extraction to thousands of Amazonian households today. For many observers, the organisation and performance of the wild rubber industry – then and now – provides a good illustration of extractive industries in Amazonia.

This policy brief reports on the key findings of telephone surveys about the prevalence and consequences of COVID-19 among 469 rural communities in the Departments of Loreto and Ucayali, conducted in July and August 2020. COVID-19 reached most communities and although the fact that mortality rates in indigenous communities are of concern, the mortality rate is higher in peasant communities than in indigenous communities. With limited access to medical services, people relied heavily on traditional medicine and on wild resources for food and earnings. Cash and food assistance were received, mostly from the government, but health assistance was practically absent. Policy implications are discussed.

Few periods in South American history have so captured the imagination and begged the attention of scholars as the Amazon rubber boom. For fifty years, the extraction of wild rubber from the jungles of the Amazon fueled unprecedented economic expansion in the region: per capita incomes in the Brazilian Amazon climbed by 800 percent; the regional population increased by more than 400 percent; urban centers and secondary towns blossomed along the river banks; and the vast Amazonian forest lands were integrated into national political spheres and the international market economy. But when low-cost rubber from British plantations in Asia flooded world markets in the 1910s, rubber prices plummeted, sharply curtailing financial returns from wild rubber extraction. The price shock drove scores of traders and export houses into bankruptcy when they were unable to collect debts that were based on the future value of rubber. Urban real estate prices crashed, and service industries withered along with their customers' incomes. By the early 1920s, the boom was over, and per capita income levels had shrunk to pre-boom levels. Today, nearly a century later, such incomes (in real terms) have yet to return to boom levels in many areas despite massive state investment in Amazonia.

This paper examines coping strategies in response to covariate flood shocks and idiosyncratic health shocks among riverine peasant households in the Amazonian tropical forests. An assessment of coping strategies reveals that although precautionary savings (food stock and livestock) are important for both types of shocks, ex post labor supply responses in the form of upland cropping and resource extraction (fishing and non-timber forest product gathering) are more common to cope with the flood shock depending on local environments. A bivariate probit model examines what factors shape households' adoption decisions of gathering and fishing as a coping strategy. The analysis reveals an important insurance role of non-timber forest product gathering for the asset poor who have limited options for coping with flood risk. Targeted interventions and programs for the poor to promote sustainable forest resource use are discussed.