Agricultural colonization

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Agricultural colonization is the cultivation of previously unused landscape areas. A distinction is made between state-planned, private or unplanned agricultural colonization. Agricultural colonization is mostly used today when it comes to developments in the tropics, e.g. B. Amazonia, less also in the settlement and cultivation of northern forest areas in Canada or Siberia.

A massively forced agricultural colonization and the settlement of large populations often go hand in hand with severe soil degradation . Often it is a matter of resettlement of sections of the population from urban agglomerations into areas that are not yet used or little used for agriculture. The socio-economic aspects are also problematic when settlers on the newly developed soils have to learn new forms of cultivation, such as the settlement of highland Indians in the lowlands of Bolivia overgrown with tropical rainforest .

Case studies

Rondônia

Amazonia was developed along major transport routes, for example the Transamazônica , during the history of Brazilian settlement . Rondônia has been systematically settled since the 1970s and reached its greatest settlement phase in the 1980s. Thereafter, a steep drop in the growth rate can be recorded, as there are few opportunities to earn a living apart from agriculture and grazing. However, the total population is increasing.

Transmigration to Kalimantan

In Indonesia, between 1969 and mid-1998, around 1.6 million families were relocated from the overpopulated urban areas to the island of Kalimantan ( Borneo ) in order to counter a further increase in population and increased poverty in the cities. Kalimantan was chosen because it was a sparsely populated island which, in the opinion of the planners, would have sufficient bearing capacity for a larger settlement. The project failed on a large scale because the settlers' plots were too small and the tropical soils quickly depleted after clear-cutting. Furthermore, conflicts developed between the locals and the "Transmigrasi", mainly over land use rights. The wave of settlement was followed a few years later by a large wave of return migrants, which worsened the social hardship in the big cities. The social tensions led to political unrest in Indonesia.

Web links

literature

  • Johannes Winter: Regional development through agricultural colonization? Experiences from Bolivia, Bolivia - Reports and Analyzes , 2006 No. 29/146, pp. 42–45.
  • Thomas Ludewigs, Alvaro de Oliveira D'Antona, Eduardo Sonnewend Brondizio, Scott Hetrick: Agrarian Structure and Land-cover Change Along the Lifespan of Three Colonization Areas in the Brazilian Amazon. In: World Development, 37 (2009) Elsevier, pp. 1348-1359.
  • Robert Mihelli, Verena Kettenhofen, Bolivia 1950–1980: The agricultural colonization of the highland Indians, advanced seminar work, 2004, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (Geographical Institute), ISBN 978-3-638-27139-4 .
  • Jonathan Rigg, Land settlement in Southeast Asia: the Indonesian transmigration program , Southeast Asia: a region in transition. London, 1991 Unwin Hyman, pp. 80-108.
  • Colin Mac Andrews: Transmigration in Indonesia: prospects and problems , 1978, Asian Survey No. 18/5, pp. 458-472.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.wissenschaft-online.de/abo/lexikon/geogr/169
  2. ↑ http://www.diercke.de/kartenansicht.xtp?artId=978-3-14-100700-8&seite=219&id=5227&kartennr=5
  3. ↑ Transmigration, land rights and indigenous peoples ( Memento of March 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ http://www.asienhaus.de/public/archiv/05-3-047.pdf
  5. ↑ Indonesian transmigration policy provokes unrest ( Memento from August 1, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )