Before the Bulldozer: The Nambiquara Indians and the World Bank (Brazil) - Hardcover

Price, David

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9780932020673: Before the Bulldozer: The Nambiquara Indians and the World Bank (Brazil)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0932020674 ISBN 13: 9780932020673

Publisher: Seven Locks Pr, 1989

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This is the tale of one anthropologist's attempt to defend a small, traditional society from the onslaught of development in the form of a 1,000-mile highway in western Brazil, financed in part by the World Bank. Before The Bulldozer shows how bureaucratic processes that play themselves out in Washington can destroy vast tracts of fragile land and bring misery to thousands.

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From Publishers Weekly:

When the World Bank was considering a $425 million loan to Brazil to construct a thousand-mile highway across the country, social anthropologist Price was hired as a consultant. His job was to evaluate the effects of the proposed highway on native peoples, and recommend action to protect their interests. He had experience in Brazil--three years of fieldwork among the Nambiquara in western Brazil and two years with FUNAI, the government agency responsible for Indian affairs. Price's advice was ignored by the World Bank and the Brazilian government, as was advice by ecologists, demographers, forestry and agriculture experts. He relates here events that led to a major ecological disaster in the Third World, one that continues with cooperation and encouragement from the developed world. This is a tale of corruption, racism and bureaucratic blindness that raises a question of morality: Can we afford this kind of "development" in the Third World? Price returned to Brazil in 1986 as a tourist to discover chaos and calamity: tropical forest gone, settlers finding worthless land, desertification, misery among the Indians. The author points out that Brazil is not unique--the same thing occurs in other "developing" countries. A tragic story.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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