Henry Ford’s Amazon Misadventure

We visited Belterra, one of the two cities that Henry Ford set up in the Amazon during the 1930s when he tried to break Great Britain’s monopoly on rubber production. His other city, Fordlandia, was better known at the time. Despite pouring tens of millions of dollars into the development of millions of acres of land in Belterra and Fordlandia, Ford was never able to grow a commercially viable product due primarily to bad agronomy. He planted the trees too close together, which caused diseases to spread quickly in the humid tropics.

Ford’s operation was a typical top down model, with him trying to control all of the steps of production. The same fate would later occur in the 1970s and 1980s when another American billionaire, Daniel Ludwig, would try to do the same thing with cellulose production at his Jari Project in the Amazon. Again it was a top town, control-everything model. Neither Fordlandia nor Jari worked.

But, today the same land that Ford lost millions on is producing a much diversified agricultural economy. We saw soybeans, corn, rice, cassava, cattle, hogs, chickens, etc. being raised by hundreds, if not thousands of Brazilian farmers. But instead of a top down model, it is a bottom up one where the local farmers have experimented and learned a cropping system unique to the Amazon which allows them to productively and efficiently farm.

How does this relate to the agurbs®? I’m becoming more and more convinced that a “one size fits all” approach to economic development is not the way of the future. Our society is moving from a top down one to one that is fostering the creation of many new entrepreneurs. These new entrepreneurs are often from groups that have not been considered entrepreneurial in the past, but are going to blossom and thrive in the years ahead.