The Andean Countries: Lofty and Troubled

The Andean Countries: Lofty and Troubled

IT.Venezuela

IU.Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana

IV.Colombia

IW.Ecuador

IX.Peru

IY.Landlocked Bolivia

113. Brazil: Populous Rain-Forested Giant

114. The Southern Midlatitude Countries: South America’s “Down Under”

IZ.Argentina

JA.Chile

JB.Uruguay: Buffer State

JC.Landlocked Paraguay

South America is the fourth-largest continent, and contains the world’s largest remaining tropical rain forest. South America is sometimes called a “sleeping giant,” a land with great potential for economic development and political leadership.

The Andean countries of South America include Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. These countries share the traits of environmental zonation, fragmented settlement patterns, populous highlands and sparsely settled frontiers, productive coastal lowlands (except Bolivia), significant indigenous populations, dominant Hispanic traditions, poverty, and primate cities (except Venezuela). Venezuela was one of the founding members of OPEC and is a major oil producer, but its population remains poor mainly because of unfortunate political events such as the attempt by President Hugo Chavez to bring the country’s state-owned oil company under his personal control. This resulted in a prolonged strike that sent the economy into a sharp downward spiral. Colombia is a country of great potential but has been mired in violence and warfare for decades, as leftist guerillas wage war and launch terrorist attacks against government forces. FARC, the main rebel group, controls swaths of Colombian territory and derives most of its funding from selling and trafficking of drugs, and taxing the coca growers. Ecuador is an oil-exporting country and is also the world’s largest exporter of bananas. Peru is a poor country that depends upon fishing and mining for most of its revenue, and oil extraction is increasing in importance. Peru has suffered bouts of rebel activity from groups such as the Shining Path, and the growing and trafficking of drugs remains a serious problem. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, and has grown poorer over the last twenty-five years. Its rugged, elevated terrain is generally poor for agriculture, and its landlocked borders prevent easy shipment of its goods to world markets.

Brazil is the giant of South America, the second largest country in the Western Hemisphere in population and third largest in area. Brazil contains two of the world’s largest cities: Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Physically Brazil is composed mainly of extensive lowlands and low uplands. The Amazon River flows through the northern part of the country. Its surrounding tropical rain forest, the world’s largest, is increasingly threatened by development and destructive agricultural practices. Brazil’s Atlantic coastal rain forest is also imperiled. Brazil was settled by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and became an important exporter of sugar to Europe. Brazil experienced a number of economic booms and busts, including gold, rubber, coffee, and citrus. Brazil has also been increasing and diversifying its industrial and manufacturing sectors, but the country is lacking in fossil fuels, which hampers development. Brazil also has the world’s most unequal distribution of wealth. North of Brazil lie Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, all mostly based around plantation agriculture.

Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay make up South America’s “Southern Cone.” Except Paraguay these countries are all the most economically developed in Latin America. Argentina has a well-developed transportation network designed to bring the agricultural products of its productive pampas to European markets. Argentina suffered an economic collapse in 2001, but high world prices for its wool, natural gas, and other exports created a rebound a few years later. Chile is a long, narrow country with a great variety of climates from the world’s driest desert in the north to temperate rain forest in the south. Chile is a major copper exporter, attempting to diversify its economy and join into free-trade agreements with a number of countries, including the U.S. Uruguay is a small, relatively wealthy nation with few natural resources to fuel industry; the country relies upon agricultural exports, especially beef, as well as textiles. Paraguay is a poor, landlocked nation with historically little trade, though soybeans and cotton have grown in importance in recent years.

Key Terms and Concepts

222. 
     The Andean countries are Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. These countries share a number of traits, including pronounced vertical and horizontal zonation; fragmented settlement patterns, with populous highland areas and sparsely settled frontiers; productive coastal lowlands; a significant number of indigenous peoples; dominant Hispanic traditions; widespread poverty; and the preponderance of primate cities, except in Venezuela. [p. 573]
     

223. 
     In Colombia, illegal cocaine has been one of the largest sources of export revenue. Several cities currently are or have been dominated economically by cocaine trafficking cartels. FARC, the main rebel group, is in control of several Colombian provinces, and it and the other warring factions in Colombia generate their funding by taxing coca growers. Peru exports little agriculture (and has to import much of its food supply), and mining exports are important, but the growing, processing and trafficking of coca and cocaine represents as much as 4 percent of the country’s gross national product. Coca production in Bolivia has declined in recent years, and former coca farmers there are now growing crops such as bananas and coffee. [pp. 576-576, 579, 581]
     

224. 
     Several factors have made Bolivia the poorest country in South America. Most importantly, the country is landlocked, with no way to ship its goods out by sea to foreign markets. Bolivia’s east is mainly a sparsely populated tropical wilderness, and its western section is arid and extremely mountainous. Nearly half of Bolivia’s workforce is employed in agricultural fields, despite the country’s unfavorable climatic conditions for export agriculture. While there is some hope for Bolivia’s reserves of natural gas, and its production of illicit coca has declined, the country remains very poor, and unlike most other Latin American countries its economy has worsened and unemployment has risen over the last few decades. [pp. 580-581]
     

225. 
     Brazil is the “giant” of South America both in population and in area. Its 189 million people, as of 2007, ranks it as the second-most populated country in the Western Hemisphere, and the country’s area of 3.3 million square miles makes it nearly as large as all the other South American nations put together. Brazil also has South America’s largest economy. [p. 581]
     

226. 
     The Trans-Amazon Highway project, begun in the 1970s, is an ambitious construction project whose ultimate goal is to bisect the continent east to west through Amazonia to the Peruvian coast. One benefit of this international project, called the Regional Initiative for the Infrastructure Integration of South America, is that it will facilitate Brazil’s access to Asian markets. A significant cost, however, it that the main route and its feeder lines provide easy access for landless peasants, who have greatly accelerated the rate of tropical deforestation. [pp. 585-587]
     

227. 
     Shifting cultivation, a practice found in many tropical areas around the world, is normally a relatively benign agricultural practice if the farmed land is allowed to return to its natural state for several years. In the Amazon region, however, when farmers have exhausted the tropical soils, instead of allowing the land to lay fallow, large cattle operations move into the lands that have just been cleared out by the previous farmers. Without the protective vegetation cover, the land now being grazed by cattle is subjected to excessive cycles of wet and dry conditions and to harmful ultraviolet radiation. These conditions turn the soil into infertile laterite, from which it is virtually impossible for natural tropical forest regrowth to occur. When the land has become too infertile for the ranchers, they move their cattle on to the next available land cleared by farmers during shifting cultivation. This “shifting ranching” cycle is very destructive to the land in the Amazon rainforest. [p. 586]
     

228. 
     Native American groups in the Amazon region are generally opposed to mineral extraction and petroleum production in their regions because they do not believe that any benefit will come to them from these developments, and it would likely result in the destruction of the forest around them. They are hoping to use revenues from their own ecotourism enterprises to demonstrate alternate economic uses for rain forests to central governments. [p. 587]
     

229. 
     Brazil has experienced several economic boom and bust cycles throughout its history. Brazil’s first major export was sugar. It was the world’s leading source for it in the seventeenth century. The development of sugar production in the West Indies and other New World colonies in the eighteenth century contributed to a sharp decline in the amount of sugar produced in Brazil. However, Brazil never stopped growing sugar, and was again the world’s leading sugar exporter by the twenty-first century. In the mid-1700s, Brazil was producing nearly half of the world’s gold, but this amount was in decline by the end of the century. Rubber was Brazil’s next major worldwide export, starting in the nineteenth century, but a severe blight affecting the rubber plantations in Brazil effectively wiped out the industry in Brazil by 1910. Also in the nineteenth century, coffee became another boom product of Brazil. While Brazil is still on the forefront of coffee production and export to this day, it no longer dominates the world market as it once did thanks to increased worldwide competition and the dramatic decline in coffee prices. In addition to coffee and sugar, rice, soybeans, beef, and orange concentrate are major agricultural exports from Brazil. The country is also a major mining and developing manufacturing center. [pp. 584, 588]
     

230. 
     Brazil is the world’s leading producer of ethanol, a biofuel that it produces from its abundant sugarcane harvest. In fact, it is so committed to ethanol production that it plans to double sugarcane harvests within the next decade. Although the U.S. also grows sugarcane along its Gulf Coast, its production of ethanol is derived primarily from corn. The two countries are cooperating in research and development as they relate to this alternative energy source, and combined they account for 70 percent of present world production. [p. 589]
     

231. 
     Argentina became an agriculturally productive country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was spurred on in part by largely British-backed transportation and industrialization improvements. Local Argentine industries grew from tariffs imposed on the imports of foreign goods and later from the absence of those imports during World Wars I and II. After World War II Argentina’s industrial base expanded and diversified under state-led policies, though on the world market Argentina’s manufactures have yet to play a major role. The country remains mainly agriculturally based; a doubling of mutton prices and tripling of wool prices worldwide led to an enormous increase in the sheep production on the harsh lands of Patagonia. Argentina’s economy stalled not long after World War II, mainly because of the country’s disastrous politics. An outright economic collapse in 2001 led to widespread poverty. A sharp devaluation of Argentina’s currency several years later allowed the national economy to begin a rebound, especially with the help of oil and natural gas exports. [pp. 591-592]
     

232. 
     The free-market reforms begun under the Pinochet regime in Chile, and enlarged after 1990 when democracy returned to the country, are important aspects of Chile’s current economic prosperity. Chile has entered into free-trade agreements with the United States, South Korea, and the European Union. Its exports – including copper, salmon, fruits, and wood products – are booming. Most recently, Chile has benefited from China’s need for Chilean resources and raw materials. [pp. 592-593]
     

This chapter should enable your students to...

• 
  Appreciate how topographic variety creates a predictable range of environmental conditions and livelihood opportunities
  
• 
  Know how diverse and accomplished the indigenous cultures of the region were, and how European conquest and colonization decimated and changed these cultures
  
• 
  Recognize the predominant ethnic patterns of the region and how ethnicity correlates with livelihood, wealth, and political power
  
• 
  Evaluate the region’s efforts to shift from raw-material exports to manufacturing through participation in free-trade agreements
  
• 
  Understand how U.S. interests have shaped the region’s political and economic systems
  

115. 
     
     Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2017
     2017 -> Leadership ohio
     2017 -> Ascension Lutheran Church Counter’s Schedule January to December 2017
     2017 -> Board of directors juanita Gibbons-Delaney, mha, rn president 390 Stone Castle Pass Atlanta, ga 30331
     2017 -> Military History Anniversaries 16 thru 31 January Events in History over the next 15 day period that had U. S. military involvement or impacted in some way on U. S military operations or American interests
     2017 -> The Or Shalom Cemetery Community Teaching on related issues of Integral
     2017 -> Ford onthult samenwerking met Amazon Alexa en introduceert nieuwe navigatiemogelijkheden van Ford sync® 3 met Applink
     2017 -> Start Learn and Increase gk. Question (1) Name the term used for talking on internet with the help of text messege?
     2017 -> Press release from 24. 03. 2017 From a Charleston Car to a Mafia Sedan
     2017 -> Tage Participants
     2017 -> Citi Chicago Debate Championship Varsity and jv previews
     
     
     
     Download 0.91 Mb.
     
     Share with your friends: