Changing Climate, Changing Worlds by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030373122
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

7.9 Social and Environmental Changes

For the ribeirinhos of the Lago Grande , extreme floods and droughts are linked to other environmental and social changes affecting their activities. Several people indicated deforestation upriver as being the cause of extreme floods and droughts. M.P. Bonnet thinks that they are likely to be right. For many inhabitants, local deforestation, due to population growth, agriculture, and cattle raising, also causes small rivers to dry out and temperature to increase. In its turn, many activities are disrupted by extreme floods and drought and are likely to evolve.

Substantial deforestation in the várzeas of the Lago Grande, as in other floodplains of the Amazon, was caused by jute (Corchorus capsularis), intensively cultivated as a cash crop from the 1940s to the 1990s (WinklerPrins 2006; Reno et al. 2011). Several decades ago, the forest used to be close to the lake, and jaguars used to attack the cattle in the riverside villages,14 but nobody has seen them for a long time, especially after the Translago road was built, around 1970. Agriculture was a major activity of the Lago Grande until the late 1990s. In terra firme, land dedicated to slash-and-burn agriculture increased by 26% between 1985 and 1997 but decreased by 18% between 1997 and 2014 (Peres 2016). The villages of the Lago Grande produced cassava flour for their own consumption and also commercialized it in Santarem. But, according to local people, when the government started providing social assistance, especially family allowance and cultivators’ retirement fees, in 1997, cassava production decreased tremendously, as confirmed by the satellite images. Currently, inhabitants produce cassava only for their own subsistence, but are not fully self-sufficient, so they import cassava flour from Santarem. Agriculture decreased even more in the várzea than in terra firme. Várzea crops described above can still be observed at the entrance of the lake (boca do lago), in the eastern part, but already in the villages of Aracy and Itacumini, people do not cultivate on the lakeside anymore, as it floods. In Piedade, in the western part of the lake, dwellers also used to cultivate várzea short-cycle plants and fruit trees, but they lost all their fruit trees and ceased that form of production. Now they only plant a few vegetables, herbs, and spices in raised pots and dedicate their activities to fishing and cattle raising.

Fishing has experienced a tremendous boom. Currently, fishing is the main economic activity in all the floodplains of the lower Amazon. It is estimated to be practiced by 84% of the households of these areas, who fish on average three times a week during 4–5 hour trips, catching approximately almost 1200 kg over a year, of which half is consumed by the family and the other half is sold (Almeida et al. 2011: 109). In the Lago Grande, the ribeirinhos used to fish only for their own subsistence (Fig. 7.11). They all recall how abundant (farto) it used to be. They occasionally sold a little bit of fish to Santarem, preserved in salt. When ice became available in the 1970s, they were able to sell bigger quantities.

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