Word: amazon
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...Amazon basin there are three types of rivers-yellow, white and black. Only the yellow rivers (actually a tawny brown) have fertile valleys. The yellow rivers, of which the Amazon proper is the best example, carry silt, and when they overflow, leave rich deposits on the land. The black rivers are stagnant and so acid that even fish cannot live in them. The white rivers have ceased to serve as anything but drainage canals. Tropic downpours have long since washed away all fertility from their valleys...
...pound, prodigious fortunes were made by rubber barons who hired natives to slip through the jungles and tap wild trees (which the Indians had known as "weeping wood"). But first, plantation rubber from the Indies and then synthetic rubber from the U.S. cut the price. Today the Amazon valley is barely struggling along with a temporary subsidy guaranteeing 50? a pound-more than twice the world price...
Hope for a Future. The one hope for the Amazon is to grow rubber trees in plantations. Henry Ford tried it and failed. His plantations succumbed to leaf rot. When Ford sold out for a nominal price to the Brazilian government, the Instituto Agronômico took over where he left off. Today Dr. Camargo has turned Fordlandia into a plantation for growing hardwood trees and cacao, and breeding water buffalo. But 90 miles downstream at Belterra, he has 2,225,000 healthy rubber trees growing...
...with trunks of one variety grafted on wild rubber roots, and boughs of still another variety grafted on the trunks. Each tree should produce many times as much rubber as a wild tree. Within a few years Belterra may produce, nearly a third as much rubber as the whole Amazon valley did at its peak...
...Camargo is convinced, however, that the Amazon cannot thrive on rubber alone. Farmers must live during the seven years that their rubber plantations are growing to bearing age. He believes they must devote permanently at least 40% of their land to other crops. He has already found one other successful crop: jute...