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States of Amazonas, Pará, Acre, Rondônia, Roraima, Amapá, and Tocantins.
This region lies mostly within the Amazon basin. It is largely covered by lush, tropical, rain forests. The Amazon River traverses the middle of the region from west to east before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. There are also numerous other rivers in the area. By volume, this area has the largest concentration of fresh water in the world one fifth of all the earth's fresh water reserves. There are two main Amazonian cities: Manaus, capital of the State of Amazonas, and Belém, capital of the State of Pará.
The Amazon basin has, since its discovery, offered Europeans a tantalizing vision of ready wealth and natural bounty. Until the mid 19th century, however, the region languished as an economic backwater. The Amazon boomed with the rising demand for rubber in the late 19th century. The population grew more than six times and regional income some 12 times between 1850 and 1910, when the rubber market collapsed.
There was renewed interest in the Amazon's mineral wealth and agricultural potential in the 1960's and 1970's. Changes in legislation governing mineral concessions and the readiness of state companies to form joint ventures with foreign corporations increased exploration and mining. The government sponsored a variety of colonization schemes, all predicated on the notion that the unpeopled reaches of the Amazon forest were a safety valve to absorb the land-hungry peasants of the northeast.
The government incentives to encourage farming in the Amazon resulted in the region becoming increasingly threatened by environmental problems. Development projects and domestic migration during the 1970's and 1980's led to deforestation of 328,700 sq.km of the region. Fires in the forest became an issue of world-wide concern. Accordingly, the Brazilian government launched various policies to control development. Fiscal incentives and official credits to livestock and agricultural projects in the area were suspended. Exportation of timber was also prohibited. Since 1989, the pace of deforestation has been reduced by half, leaving 91.5 percent of the Amazon intact. Today, protection of the Amazon is being monitored by satellite and domestic efforts are being reinforced by the international community through the Pilot Programme for the Protection of the Brazilian Rain Forest, which is sponsored by the European Community, the United States, and a dozen other countries.
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