ABSTRACT
The general region that includes Fordland and Belterra has been transformed by the introduction of commodity production as well as by environmental policies for the Amazon that is meant to preserve natural areas against the expansion of commodity production, logging and ranching. Beginning in the late 1990s, commodity producers started to buy the ranches and small farms on the Santarem plateau, which presented better conditions for soy production than those normally encountered in the Amazon. Exceptional conditions exist for commodity production in the study area, which do not exist in much of the Amazon. W. Dean uses ecological and political economical perspectives to depict rubber production in Brazil contextualised in global markets in which Fordland and Belterra are presented among many examples of the environmental and commercial failure of Brazilian rubber production during the twentieth century. Brazilian planners also devised a number of settlement programmes that failed during the twentieth century. The settlement projects nearby are derelict.
