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Impact of agriculture on the environment
Impact of agriculture on the environment
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Environmental Impacts of Unsustainable Agriculture in Brazil and Costa Rica
1661 Words4 Pages
Since the sixteenth century, foreign dominance over Central and South America has been attributed to farming and plantations. Spaniards introduced the concept of plantation systems to the new world in the island of “La Española” or Hispaniola. From there, it spread through the Caribbean, eventually finding its way into Central and South American countries. Plantation systems were founded on slave labor and brutal methods of exploitation imposed by European colonists on indigenous peoples, and eventually to African slaves, in order to perform labor-intensive farming practices. Since the introduction of the use of slaves, these countries became known as having a plantation economy. Plantation economies are based on agricultural large-scale production of traditional and nontraditional staple crops grown on large farms or plantations and rely on the export of their crops as a source of income. These plantation systems were prevalent all through Latin America up until the late nineteenth century where they became considered a monopoly capital asset. The combination of cheap labor and pre-capitalist methods of exploitation assured European monopolies high profits from their plantation’s produce vended in the world market. By this time, large merging of land, known as “latifundios”, increased the capacity of export agriculture, yet decreased the availability of food production for local consumption. This, in conjunction with governments’ fixation on the production of one type of exporting commodity, resulted in the impoverishment of Latin American masses. Major staple crops throughout Latin America like coffee, bananas, and later on soybean grew popular demand in the world market. Thus, overall modernization of agricultural ...
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Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/index/en/?iso3=BRA
Weinhold, D. (2013). Soybeans, Poverty and Inequality in the Brazilian Amazon. Science Direct, 52, 132-143.
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