Fragile lands of Latin America : strategies for sustainable development

Entries in this collection of research papers discuss nonconventional strategies for sustained development and management of these lands. Section I consists of three papers describing conceptual frameworks for fragile land development, while Section II presents nine papers, derived mainly from research undertaken in the Amazon, which address various aspects of tropical rain forest management. The two papers of Section III explore potentially sustainable farming strategies on Andean highlands, where efforts to revive pre-Columbian techniques of hillside terrace farming and raised field farming are being pursued by Peruvian peasant communities. Section IV consists of a single chapter on an adaptive farming system in arid northwestern Mexico, while the final section presents brief reviews of development research in progress in an area of high rainfall - Colombia"s Choco region - and of an ambitious project to examine the financial performance of agroforestry systems on small Central American demonstration farms. All of the resource management strategies examined in the volume tend to be well-adapted to their natural environments and therefore indefinitely sustainable. Preliminary efforts were made to quantify the financial costs and benefits of each of the strategies.