Belterra is a municipal seat and rubber

plantation A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. Th ...

site some south of the Brazilian city of Santarém in the

North North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography. Etymology The word ''north ...

ern federal state of

Pará Pará is a state of Brazil, located in northern Brazil and traversed by the lower Amazon River. It borders the Brazilian states of Amapá, Maranhão, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Amazonas and Roraima. To the northwest are the borders of Guyana a ...

, at the edge of the Planalto at above sea level.

Location

Amongst soil scientists, Belterra is famous for the underlying fertile,

anthropogenic Anthropogenic ("human" + "generating") is an adjective that may refer to: * Anthropogeny, the study of the origins of humanity Counterintuitively, anthropogenic may also refer to things that have been generated by humans, as follows: * Human i ...

soil of '

Terra preta ''Terra preta'' (, locally , literally "black soil" in Portuguese) is a type of very dark, fertile anthropogenic soil (anthrosol) found in the Amazon Basin. It is also known as "Amazonian dark earth" or "Indian black earth". In Portuguese its ful ...

', which might have been amongst the criteria for the selection of this site for the plantation. While Terra Preta soil patterns occur all over the Brazilian lowland, this site is extremely well developed and also scientifically surveyed and documented The tertiary highland is composed of some clay layers (Belterra clay) of kaolinitic sediments of a Pliocene lake, with a distinct escarpment to the North and West of the plain, which leads down to the

Várzea forest A várzea forest is a seasonal floodplain forest inundated by whitewater rivers that occurs in the Amazon biome. Until the late 1970s, the definition was less clear and várzea was often used for all periodically flooded Amazonian forests. Althoug ...

lowland at the river bank of the

Tapajós The Tapajós ( pt, Rio Tapajós ) is a river in Brazil. It runs through the Amazon Rainforest and is a major tributary of the Amazon River. When combined with the Juruena River, the Tapajós is approximately long. It is one of the largest clearw ...

river. The municipality holds part of the

Tapajós National Forest The Tapajós National Forest ( pt, Floresta Nacional do Tapajós) is a Brazilian national forest in the state of Pará, Brazil. It supports sustainable exploitation of the natural resources in an area of Amazon rainforest. Location The Tapajós ...

, a sustainable use conservation unit created in 1974.

History

¹⁴C analyses based on Terra Preta ceramic artefacts found in Belterra showed, that this area was populated and cultivated by the indigenous population in an intensive way at least since 500 B.C. Belterra was founded as a rubber plantation, after the economic failure of

Fordlândia Fordlândia (, ''Ford-land'') is a district and adjacent area of in the city of Aveiro, in the Brazilian state of Pará. It is located on the east banks of the Tapajós river roughly south of the city of Santarém. It was established by ...

, which had been founded in 1928 by

Henry Ford Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist, business magnate, founder of the Ford Motor Company, and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. By creating the first automobile that ...

. The intention of the US-Department of Commerce in the 1920s was to produce rubber in Brazil and to import it to USA. The advantage of the Belterra plantation over the plantation of Fordlândia to the south is the flat topography, which enables the use of machinery. In its peak time in the late 1930s some were cultivated with ''

Hevea brasiliensis ''Hevea brasiliensis'', the Pará rubber tree, ''sharinga'' tree, seringueira, or most commonly, rubber tree or rubber plant, is a flowering plant belonging to the spurge family Euphorbiaceae originally native to the Amazon basin, but is now pa ...

'' (

rubber Rubber, also called India rubber, latex, Amazonian rubber, ''caucho'', or ''caoutchouc'', as initially produced, consists of polymers of the organic compound isoprene, with minor impurities of other organic compounds. Thailand, Malaysia, and ...

tree). In Belterra, new breeding methods with local varieties were applied, which prevented the leaf disease, a result of the monoculture in Fordlândia. This was very labour-intensive and therefore expensive. Together with the worldwide decline on demand on natural rubber, the plantation was not cost-effective anymore. Ford sold it to the Brazilian government, which is still running the plantation under EMBRAPA. Today, the area of the plantation is some covered extensively with mainly old rubber trees. It still gives the impression of a plantation with some 1000 - 2000 inhabitants (mainly plantation workers and their families). At the peak time, it had a population of some 8 - 10,000 people. According to a 2010 census, the entire district population, including surrounding villages, is reported as 16,324.

References

External links

*
Description of Belterra
{{DEFAULTSORT:Belterra, Para Municipalities in Pará Environmental soil science Amazon basin