Rainforest Corridors

Rainforest Corridors: The Transamazon Colonization Scheme offers a sweeping examination of one of the most ambitious—and controversial—development projects in the history of the tropics. Beginning in 1970, the Brazilian government set out to integrate the vast Amazonian interior with the rest of the nation by carving the 3,300-kilometer Transamazon Highway through dense rainforest and settling hundreds of thousands of families along its route. This bold plan promised modernization and economic growth but quickly raised global concerns about ecological destruction, threats to Indigenous communities, and the viability of agriculture in fragile upland soils. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, this book traces both the achievements and failures of the colonization scheme, placing it within the broader political and economic forces that drove Amazonian development.

Combining ecological, agricultural, medical, and ethnographic perspectives, the study documents how settlers struggled against infertile soils, pests, and climatic challenges while also contending with limited credit, poor farm management, and debilitating diseases such as malaria and gastrointestinal infections. Chapters explore the role of public health services, local healing practices, and the settlers’ adaptive use of medicinal plants, alongside analyses of agroecosystem productivity and crop choices imposed by government policy. With vivid accounts of pioneer communities and careful attention to cultural diversity, the book situates the Transamazon within the global debate over tropical deforestation and sustainable development. At once a critical assessment and a constructive proposal, it offers enduring lessons on the limits of large-scale colonization and the need for more modest, ecologically attuned models of settlement in the world’s largest rainforest.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.