Wait for the Weeping Wood

In Brazil's provisional budget for 1949, Congress considered an extraordinary item: $2,000,000 for the Instituto Agronomico do Norte. The item is extraordinary not only because it is more than three times as large as ever before, but because it is a $2,000,000 vote of confidence in one man, Felisberto Camargo.

Dr. Camargo is a 61-year-old professor of agriculture who has a program for turning 40% of Brazil from a liability into an asset. For seven sweat-soaked years, he has labored in the steaming valley of the Amazon, that lush jungle which is more than four times as large (1,175,000 square miles) as the state of Texas.

The Great Waste. The deceptive luxuriance of the valley has long filled men with dreams of wealth, but actually the valley is a great wasteland. From the air the Amazon looks at one minute like a wide brown river (it varies from one to seven miles in width). In the next minute, it has lost all pattern in a thousand islands of every conceivable size.

In the Amazon basin there are three types of rivers--yellow, white and black. Only the yellow rivers (actually a tawny brown) have fertile valleys. The yellow rivers, of which the Amazon proper is the best example, carry silt, and when they overflow, leave rich deposits on the land. The black rivers are stagnant and so acid that even fish cannot live in them. The white rivers have ceased to serve as anything but drainage canals. Tropic downpours have long since washed away all fertility from their valleys.

Even where the soil is fertile, the only wealth yet tapped is rubber. For a few brief years at the turn of the century, when rubber sold for $1 a pound, prodigious fortunes were made by rubber barons who hired natives to slip through the jungles and tap wild trees (which the Indians had known as "weeping wood"). But first, plantation rubber from the Indies and then synthetic rubber from the U.S. cut the price. Today the Amazon valley is barely struggling along with a temporary subsidy guaranteeing 50-c- a pound--more than twice the world price.

Hope for a Future. The one hope for the Amazon is to grow rubber trees in plantations. Henry Ford tried it and failed. His plantations succumbed to leaf rot. When Ford sold out for a nominal price to the Brazilian government, the Instituto Agronomico took over where he left off. Today Dr. Camargo has turned Fordlandia into a plantation for growing hardwood trees and cacao, and breeding water buffalo. But 90 miles downstream at Belterra, he has 2,225,000 healthy rubber trees growing.

They are very special rubber trees, with trunks of one variety grafted on wild rubber roots, and boughs of still another variety grafted on the trunks. Each tree should produce many times as much rubber as a wild tree. Within a few years Belterra may produce, nearly a third as much rubber as the whole Amazon valley did at its peak.

Dr. Camargo is convinced, however, that the Amazon cannot thrive on rubber alone. Farmers must live during the seven years that their rubber plantations are growing to bearing age. He believes they must devote permanently at least 40% of their land to other crops. He has already found one other successful crop: jute.

Last year the Amazon produced 8,800 tons of jute, almost half of what Brazil used (for coffee bags). At 16-c- a pound, jute from the Amazon yielded a return of over $200 an acre.

Cup & Lip. Dr. Camargo is a practical man. He does not for a minute dream that he has licked the problem of the Amazon. Except for the 5,000 families who work for him at Fordlandia and Belterra, the Amazon has practically no agricultural population to apply his methods.

Dr. Camargo believes that to find a population that can successfully live and work on the steaming Amazon, it may be necessary to import Asiatics. But that is a political pipe dream in Brazil, which takes a dim view of Asiatics who are accustomed to such conditions. So Dr. Camargo does not share UNESCO's easy dreams of swiftly building up a great civilization on the "Hylean Amazon." Of all the suspected wealth of the Amazon, he has found no treasure ripe for exploitation, only the eventual means of conquering a great wasteland.

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