ABSTRACT
By the late 1970s various reports were sounding the alarm about worsening soil erosion in Bolivia, a landlocked and mostly mountainous republic of over 4 million people in central South America. Books such as Bolivia: The Despoiled Country by Walter Terrazas Urquidi (1974) and The Wasted Country: The Ecological Crisis in Bolivia by Mariano Baptista Gumucio (1977) alerted many Bolivians and Latin Americans to the country’s grave dilemma. The widely read Losing Ground by North American Erik Eckholm (1976) introduced it to a still larger audience in the United States and Western Europe. Academic and governmental studies spelled out some of the serious consequences of Bolivia’s erosion crisis (Grover 1974; LeBaron et al. 1979; Preston 1969). Accelerating erosion was degrading farm and range-land, forcing floods downstream, and leading to destructive desertification and dust storms. Recent estimates in Bolivia’s major newspapers surmise that between 35 and 41 percent of the country now suffers moderate to extreme loss of soils (Los Tiempos 1991; Presencia 1990).
