Population Movements, Environmental Change and Social Conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

The relationship between population growth, environmental change and social conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon is very complex. Spite such complexity, the Brazilian Amazon shows that there is a geographical relationship between the areas of most intense frontier development and environmental change, the areas with the highest population growth and the main scenarios of social conflicts. In addition, it is argued that population growth in the Brazilian Amazon is due basically to a migration process and not to high birth rates, and more important this migration process can be labeled as transformational migrations. The above means that the migratory process in the 1970s and early 1980s was a product of the opening up of the Amazon due to governmental activities. This explains why population movements in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1970s were more inter-regional, reflecting the opening of the Amazon and the development policy implemented in the region which made it very popular for people from other regions. In the 1990s it responds more to an internal dynamics of the Amazon, basically related to the creation of job opportunities in some Amazonian towns, consequently today population movements in the Brazilian Amazon are basically intra-regional. I use two case studies (the states of Roraima and Para) to show how the relationship between population movements, environmental change and social conflicts is constructed in the Brazilian Amazon. Moreover, these cases attempt to demonstrate that today the Amazon is more urban than rural, and what is more important these migrants are better understood as job seekers than traditional frontier pioneers. Thus, population movement in the Amazon has to be understood in terms of a combination of factors of expulsion and factors of attraction linked to the whole country. These factors are not only environmental, but are also as I