Effects of the expanding agriculture frontier in the Bolivian Amazon

Last week, a paper published in Nature spurred a lot of debates on the internet about the future of agriculture and our ability to feed the 9 billion people that the world will have in 2050. One important aspect related to this debate is the availability of agricultural land. However, people do not always have a clear idea of what expanding the agriculture land means. Here an example of what is happening in one of the most biodiversily rich places of the world: the Bolivan Amazon. Let’s just have a look at a few Google earth’s images of the Lake Peroto in the Llanos de Moxos (dep. of Beni in the Bolivian Amazon).

Image taken the 17 of May 2003. Land use is extensive cattle ranching. Typical floating vegetation (locally called “yomomo”) is growing along the shores of Lake Peroto.

Image taken the 20th of Nov 2004. Land use is extensive cattle ranching. It is the end of the dry season, and the water level is extremely low. In the greenish areas inside the lakes water is almost completely evaporated. This is normal in the Llanos de Moxos, where seasonality can be extreme

Image taken the 2nd of July 2009. Land use is extensive cattle ranching. We are at the beginning of the dry season, water level is quite high, the water is clearly visible.

Image taken the 8th of August 2011. Land use is extensive cattle ranching plus industrial agriculture. 70 hectares of land in the surroundings of the lake have been used to produce rice.

What happened to the lake in 2011? Now the lake is almost completely covered with vegetation... Is it dry? Or is it the first effect of land use change: eutrophication? Based on my personal experience of having been working in the Llanos de Moxos for more than 10 years now and based on the fact that the nearby Lake Suarez is full of water (photo below) on the 15 of August 2011, I would conclude that Lake Peroto is in process of eutrophication.

Lake Suarez. Image taken the 15th of August 2011. The lake is full.

Industrial agriculture in the Beni is already causing deforestation and threatening archaeological sites (see this). Now it is also affecting lake ecology. Is industrial agriculture what people in the Beni really need? Does this kind of agriculture make any sense in a place with a density population of 1 person per square kilometre? Here, a very important part of the population lives in indigenous communities whose subsistence depends on local natural resources. What will happen to them in ten years’ time if these resources are depleted?

Ref:

Seufert V, Ramankutty N, & Foley JA (2012). Comparing the yields of organic and conventional agriculture. Nature PMID: 22535250

Soybean industrial production is bulldozing pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the Bolivian Amazon and nobody gives a damn

The journal Applied Geography and the journal Land Use Policy have recently published two papers, “Spatiotemporal modeling of the expansion of mechanized agriculture in the Bolivian lowland forests” and “Deforestation dynamics and policy changes in Bolivia’s post-neoliberal era” respectively, that depict a desolating panorama. The rate of deforestation under Evo Morales’ government is even higher than it was during the previous governments. Muller et al. say that “While overall dynamics remained relatively stable over time, the expansion of mechanized agriculture between 2001 and 2005 became more tolerant to excessive rainfall and less dependent on fertile soils. This mirrors the increasing penetration of mechanized agriculture into humid and less fertile Amazonian rainforests in the northern portion of the study area [Santa Cruz]. The map of deforestation probability substantiates these patterns and shows the highest propensities for future deforestation in the north”, while Redo et al. point out that: “Although neoliberal policies triggered an unprecedented level of forest clearing in Bolivia, rates have generally continued to increase and can be indirectly linked to the administration’s new agrarian reform and pro-environmental regulations”. The “pro-environmental” regulations of Morales’ government have actually increased deforestation rates!

The Northern Bolivian lowlands are not only an extremely important reservoir of biodiversity and home of many indigenous communities; they also hold an impressive amount of archaeological sites, most of which have never been studied or surveyed. As deforestation for industrial soybean production is moving northward, it now starts to affect the Llanos de Moxos, where most of these archaeological sites are found. Soy producers cut down the trees using bulldozers, and, in this way, they also destroy all the archaeological sites they encounter on the way. In the eastern Llanos de Moxos, in a stripe of forest called Monte San Pablo, between the River Cocharca and the River San Pablo (Fig. 1), Bolivian Mennonites are bulldozing pre-Columbian human-made earth mounds, which hold valuable remains and information about past Amazonian cultures. The destruction of pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the Bolivian Amazon is taking place while national and local governments look another way, and regrettably, with the complicity of some of the indigenous leaders who live in the area. 

Figure 1 Shaded areas are forests. Continuous line indicates the area of pre-Columbian monumental mounds. Monte San Pablo is east of the area (dashed lines) shown in Fig.2. (Lombardo and Prümers, 2010)

Figure 2. Modis Image taken a few days ago. The yellow stripes highlighted by the arrow are the portions of Monte San Pablo that have already been cleared for soybean production. The deforested area is already larger than 10.000 hectares

I have surveyed more than one hundred pre-Columbian monumental mounds and hundreds of Km of pre-Columbian canals and causeways in the area east of Trinidad, in the Beni (see map in fig.3). The monumental mounds are huge earthworks (the average mound covers 5 hectares and is 9 meters high) entirely human made, built from 400 AD to 1500 AD. They are full of pottery and burials and only very few of them have been excavated by archaeologists. The Monte San Pablo, just east of the area I surveyed, is full of monumental mounds. Those are the mounds that are being destroyed by the Mennonite bulldozers to make room for soybeans.

Figure 3. Triangles are pre-Columbian monumental mounds, lines are canals and causeways, shaded areas are forests. (Lombardo and Prümers, 2010)

Daniel Redo, Andrew C. Millington, & Derrick Hindery (2011). Deforestation dynamics and policy changes in Bolivia’s post-neoliberal era Land Use Policy : 10.1016/j.landusepol.2010.06.004

Robert Müller, Daniel Müller, Florian Schierhorn, & Gerhard Gerold (2011). Spatiotemporal modeling of the expansion of mechanized agriculture
in the Bolivian lowland forests Applied Geography : 10.1016/j.apgeog.2010.11.018

Umberto Lombardo, & Heiko Prümers (2010). Pre-Columbian human occupation patterns in the eastern plains of the Llanos de Moxos, Bolivian Amazonia Journal of Archaeological Science DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2010.02.011