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| Early Globalization and the
Destruction of the Rain Forest A closed society, the colonies in the New World were supposed to export only to Spain. Of course, the resource-rich colonies produced far more than Spain could possibly consume, and smuggling became rampant. By the late eighteenth century, when the Spanish empire became desperate for funds, Spain began to take steps to open Latin America to world trade. Globalization, and the insertion of Latin America into the global economy, therefore, began as long ago as the late eighteenth century. As exportation beyond Spain became acceptable, more and more of the Latin American countryside was turned over to sugar plantations, cacao, tobacco, and, later, rubber. It is possible, then, to look at globalization from a much longer historical perspective and examine the various environmental and social problems—both of the past and of today—which may have been triggered by this globalization. While the effects were, and are, felt much more deeply than just in the rain forest, the rain forest is a good place to start. Cuba, in the late eighteenth century, was a large producer of sugar. To make sugar the cane is crushed, then boiled. So many trees were cut down to fuel the vats to boil the sugar cane that by the 1780s and 1790s the Province of Havana in western Cuba was heavily deforested. The deforestation became so great that the Cuban government and the Imperial government were forced to promote regulations to try to control deforestation. Whereas the large-scale destruction of the Amazonian rain forest is a relatively new phenomenon, deforestation in Latin America is not. Localized instances of deforestation appear as early as the late 1700s, growing almost unabated through most of the nineteenth century. This same phenomenon is apparent in other countries in Latin America, as well. In the mid-nineteenth century, a coffee rust destroyed most of the commercial plants in Africa and sub-continental Asia, allowing South America —and in particular, Brazil—to gain control of a large portion of the world’s coffee economy. In Brazil, land was so cheap and seemingly so plentiful that large areas of forest were chopped down to plant coffee bushes. No efforts were made to replenish the land. The planters grew coffee and harvested it until the land became exhausted, then abandoned it and moved on to chop down another large area of forest. In the space of a generation or two, almost an entire forest in Southeastern Brazil, the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, was virtually destroyed. Brazilian coffee planters saw the economic rationale in being environmentally destructive. From Deforestation to Mudslides The hills have been the heart of Venezuela for almost the entire history of the country. But, the coffee plantations along the sides of these hills began causing tremendous soil erosion as early as the nineteenth century, creating a huge run-off of water during rainy periods. Then, as depression hit the industrialized world in the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. stopped importing luxury goods like coffee and bananas. This coupled with an oversupply from the tropics—Latin American countries competed with themselves as well as with Africa and Asia—caused the prices for these commodities to collapse. As the market for coffee collapsed, so did the communities that depended on coffee for their livelihood. This model of export-led development was being severely challenged. As the communities struggled with the effects of the US recession, residents of the rural areas of Venezuela began flooding into the cities in search of jobs. Slums crept in, and vegetation was cleared along the hillsides that bordered the city to make way for housing that was essentially shored up on mud. The economic crisis that placed people in the cities added a new level of environmental vulnerability to an area already ecologically fragile from years of deforestation from coffee plantations. The landslides in Venezuela in December 1999 were a disaster a long time in the making— a culmination of the problems of both rural agricultural growth and rapid urbanization. When Venezuela received an unusual amount of rain, the ensuing landslides should not have, and did not, come without warning. As the Venezuelan disaster shows, natural disasters do not hit all social classes equally. Poorer people often tend to live in marginal areas, for example, clutching the hillsides that ring many Latin American cities. Trees are cut down to make places to live and for firewood. In addition, the poor simply cannot afford to build houses that resist natural forces. Large numbers of poor people, then, wind up living in environmentally vulnerable areas in inexpensive housing. As a result, seemingly external natural events, like hurricanes, cause disproportionately more damage to poor areas than to wealthier areas. The weak powers of the state in Latin America compound this problem. There are laws in Venezuela, for example, that prohibit construction within 50 meters of a riverbank, precisely to prevent flash flooding and deforestation along those banks. In Caracas, for example, these laws are almost universally ignored. In fact, some of these neighborhoods are so dangerous that the government won’t go in to enforce them. |
