Native Fruit Tree Improvement in Amazonia: An Overview - Indigenous Fruit Trees in the Tropics: Domestication, Utilization and Commercialization - page 103

6.1.2 History of Amazonian agriculture
It is thought that between 12,000 and 25,000 years ago the ancestors of the
Native Amazonians arrived from the north, although the exact period of
immigration is not certain. Initially, these people were hunter-gatherers, but as
climates changed and forests expanded during the early Holocene, the people
gradually developed food production systems (Piperno and Pearsall, 1998),
domesticating both landscapes and plant populations in the process (Clement,
1999). During the last 5000 years, in particular, Amazonia became a biome
strongly influenced by humans, with at least 15% modified by human activities -
to such an extent that these modifications are still visible today, 400 years after
the demographic collapse caused by European conquest. It is probable that most
of the biome was modified to some extent (Mann, 2005). Before the conquest,
there were probably between 5 and 25 million people in the Amazonian biome
and these people depended principally upon horticulture for their subsistence,
with a significant number of fruit crops in their diet (Clement, 1999).
After the demographic collapse ( AD 1600-1700), Amazonia started to be
repopulated, a process that accelerated during the rubber boom (1880-1915),
which brought an influx of peoples from north-eastern Brazil, the Andes, Africa
and Europe. After the rubber crash (1915-1916), the immigration rate slowed
until the 1970s, when national efforts to integrate Amazonia into its various
Nation States and their economies accelerated, financed by cheap international
credit. This immigration soon led to the current worldwide concern about
environmental change in Amazonia, as all of the immigrants are agricultural
peoples with varying interests, knowledge and access to capital. In Brazil alone,
nearly 20% of the original forest cover has been removed since the 1970s. In
general, this has contributed little to regional development, and enormous
areas are now in secondary forests of varying ages. The lack of contribution to
regional development is mostly because the great majority of these immigrants
discovered that agriculture in Amazonia is more of a challenge than expected,
especially to those who have neither much knowledge (traditional or other)
about the region, nor the capital to obtain knowledge and inputs readily. This
discovery, in turn, caused migration within Amazonia, this time from the
countryside to the cities, although other factors obviously influenced personal
decisions about migration. In Brazilian Amazonia, 80% of the population is
now urban, including a considerable proportion of the Native American
population and the peasants who had learned horticulture from the natives,
thus leaving a large proportion of recent immigrants in the countryside -
precisely those with least traditional knowledge about Amazonia. This strongly
influenced decisions about which fruit trees to plant, and recent R&D on fruit
trees reflects these decisions.
6.2 Partial Inventory of Amazonian Fruit Improvement Activities
Research and development activities on native Amazonian fruit started in the
1930s in Brazil, with the creation of the Instituto Agronômico do Norte, Belém,