Reading Response: Garfield’s In Search of the Amazon

Allison Brown HIST 4494 Dr. Hampton March 9, 2022 Reading Response: Garfield’s In Search of the Amazon A common theme throughout Garflied’s reading and Brazil as well as the Amazon Region is the role of regional economics and the impacts of open markets in Latin America. Post-WWII this is evident though the United States acknowledgement of the price of natural rubber, and how it would rise exponentially in response to consumer and conflict demands. Important in this as well are international trade agreements and new markets for rubber. The State Department was involved in this process between March and October 1942 in conjunction with the Rubber Development Department. Together they worked to negotiate agreements with sixteen rubber producing countries in Latin America for exported surplus of crude rubber and rubber manufactured goods for the United States with fixed prices and limits of local consumption in the Latin American countries. Brazil, being the largest rubber producer regionally, at the time as well agreed in March 1942 signed an agreement with the Rubber Development Department. Garfield mentions the work of David Harvey, a “Marxist geographer” and quotes his work to explain the economic situation in Brazil and Latin America more broadly in 1942, “To say that scarcity resides in nature and that natural limits exist is to ignore how scarcity is socially produced and how ‘limits’ are a social relation within nature (including human society) rather than some externally imposed necessity” (Garfield, ----, 51). Basically, with this quote and how the author is applying it, Harvey basically is arguing that scarcity, and in this case the demand for rubber militarily and across the United States, was a capitalistic construction. Another theory from Harvey from outside the reading commonly cited is the notion of capital accumulation by disposition, essentially creating capital either through land or another service and assigning a capital value where once no imposed value was. This notion also could be applied with rubber and Latin America with the spatially of the rubber consumption and trade during these periods. Garfield writes that the Rubber Survey Committee in 1942 reached a similar conclusion, and that scarcity in the United States had two shortages: “(1) there is not enough to go around for essential purposes, and (2), where enough material exists but is unavailable where it is urgently required” (52). Another theme of the article which stands out to readers could be the practical use and opinions regarding rubber and its modern practicality. Garfield also writes on the role of the United States conceptions and notions around rubber during these periods, writing, “In transforming realms of production, transportation, communication, commerce, hygiene, sexuality, and leisure in the United States, rubber fanned the twentieth-century whirlwind of unfettered individualism and dispiriting impersonally” (57). Similar to the role culturally which other products like the cultural sensation surrounding the banana in North America with the racialized and sexualized images of Chiquita Banana from the United Fruit Company. Moreover, these cultural conceptions about rubber enforce the economic supply and shortages which occur throughout rubber’s rise in importance for the United States domestically and the war front in Europe. Garfield continues this argument with his statement that “rubber goods were imbricated in the ‘cultures of American imperialism’ … the political struggles for power with other cultures and nations that have constituted both domestic social formations and international relations” (59). Understanding these social relations and opinions regarding rubber, according to Garfield, directly fed into the American imperialist agenda and exacerbated the growing demand for rubber which would take place over the subsequent years in Brazil and across Latin America. Garfield concludes with “although the wartime campaign failed to transform modes of production and exchange in the Amazon, revisionist accounts fall into different traps in evoking lives and landscapes wasted by dictatorial wile” (126). This statement as a conclusion also speaks to the spatially and the impacts of United States’ economic interference in the interest of neoliberal economic growth and Harvey’s capital accumulation by dispossession. Questions: 1. In what ways are economic trade policies and groups relating to rubber production and consumption similar to other economic policies such as oil nationalization and policy in Mexico or trade relations with Cuba? How do they differ? 2. Was the demand and scarcity for rubber in the United States the sole reason for economic reach into Brazil and Latin America at this time? What other new or continuing economic incentives continued United States economic interests?