Territorial Implications of Economic Diversification in the Waorani Ancestral Lands

Abstract

At the beginning of the 2020s, roughly 80% of the original forest cover of the Western Amazon remained in a relatively compact form. Immersed in these forests lived a growing Indigenous population, increasingly concentrated in an expanding number of multi-family permanent settlements, each using a stable, rarely overlapping territory, mostly composed by natural forests, lakes, and rivers, to produce all the material necessities they traditionally required. Most were also going through important demographic and economic transformations, with direct implications on their particular territories and on the aggregate use and condition of the region’s forests. In this chapter, we examine if and how the adoption of a commercial crop alters the traditional use of the territory of 10 communities in the Waorani Ancestral Territory of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We propose and implement a spatial model of such a territory and compare it with the cultivation patterns of a common and widespread commercial crop: cacao. Results strongly suggest that the cultivation of cacao absorbs a scarce resource needed to use the territory. Furthermore, most changes are associated with the management of older productive trees, pointing at activities such as harvesting, processing, and the transportation of products, as important draws of this resource. We hypothesize that this resource is mostly 'uptime' (the proportion of time a community member is working or available for work), resulting in a reduction of the area used for traditional production. These results illustrate the situation of the productive territories of most permanent communities in the Waorani Ancestral Territory, and possibly other Indigenous communities of the Western Amazon where similar demographic and economic transformations are taking place.