What Settlers Want

Brazil has the eleventh largest economy in the world. Yet about one quarter of Brazilians are poor. In rural areas, even more of the population is poor.

In the 1960s, the Brazilian government began encouraging poor people to move to the Amazon rainforest. The settlers came in large numbers, looking for land to farm.

A Lot of Land, but Not for the Poor 

Brazil is a vast country but has limited areas of farmland. And this land is not shared equally. A few wealthy families have long owned most of the best farmland. Millions of poor Brazilians own no land at all. For many families, the idea of owning a farm in the Amazon basin once seemed like a distant dream.

The Brazilian government did what it could to make this dream come true. Poor families were brought to the rainforest by the government. They were given free land and money to plant their first crops.

We Need Land to Feed Our Families 

Over time, the settlers’ dream has become a nightmare for many farm families. As native Amazonians learned long ago, farming in a rainforest is difficult. The thin soil is surprisingly poor in nutrients, the substances that make a field fertile. Constant rainfall soon washes away whatever nutrients the soil once contained. As the soil loses its fertility, the amount of food it can produce shrinks. Native Amazonians solved this problem by clearing new fields every few years. Over time, their abandoned fields regained some fertility.

Brazilian settlers cannot move so easily. As more settlers have cleared land for farming, opposition to them has grown. Native Amazonians, rubber tappers, and ranchers all want settlers to leave the rainforest. Settlers argue that there is no land for them in other parts of Brazil. They say they must look to the rainforest for land to feed their families.