Abstract
At the beginning of the 2020s, roughly 80% of the original forest cover of the Western Amazon remained in a relatively compact form. Immersed in these forests lived a growing Indigenous population, increasingly concentrated in an expanding number of multi-family permanent settlements, each using a stable, rarely overlapping territory, mostly composed by natural forests, lakes, and rivers, to produce all the material necessities they traditionally required. Most were also going through important demographic and economic transformations, with direct implications on their particular territories and on the aggregate use and condition of the region’s forests. In this chapter, we examine if and how the adoption of a commercial crop alters the traditional use of the territory of 10 communities in the Waorani Ancestral Territory of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We propose and implement a spatial model of such a territory and compare it with the cultivation patterns of a common and widespread commercial crop: cacao. Results strongly suggest that the cultivation of cacao absorbs a scarce resource needed to use the territory. Furthermore, most changes are associated with the management of older productive trees, pointing at activities such as harvesting, processing, and the transportation of products, as important draws of this resource. We hypothesize that this resource is mostly 'uptime' (the proportion of time a community member is working or available for work), resulting in a reduction of the area used for traditional production. These results illustrate the situation of the productive territories of most permanent communities in the Waorani Ancestral Territory, and possibly other Indigenous communities of the Western Amazon where similar demographic and economic transformations are taking place.
This study was carried out in collaboration with EcoCiencia and NAWE. It intended to provide NAWE with a broad understanding of the territorial budget of the WAT.
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Notes
- 1.
From a wall-to-wall survey of official aerial photography (SIGTIERRAS) for the region by the first author for this study. Approximately 85% of the region’s original forest cover remained by the end of the 2010s (Sierra et al. 2021).
- 2.
Extrapolated from a non-random subsample of 23 communities with year of establishment information.
- 3.
In a few cases, communities have been established for geopolitical reasons (i.e., to establish property rights), but in our experience these are rare.
- 4.
The first European account by Gaspar de Carvajal, c. 1540–1542, describe large areas along major rivers with what appeared to be high-density settlements, with horticulture and keeping of wild animals (e.g., turtles for meat and eggs), separated by depopulated areas between them.
- 5.
Perhaps, the greatest interest in this relation originated in policymakers and managers needing to understand the effectiveness of conservation strategies using economic and social development interventions. A common criticism has been the lack of evidence of these effects (Znajda 2014; Blom et al. 2010; Mistry et al. 2010).
- 6.
Estimated from an initial population of 500 in 1960 (Cardoso et al. 2012) and a late-2010s population of 3500 (Per. Comm., G. Nenkimo 2020).
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Sierra, R. et al. (2023). Territorial Implications of Economic Diversification in the Waorani Ancestral Lands. In: López, S. (eds) Socio-Environmental Research in Latin America. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22680-9_4
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