The Challenge of a Sustainable Agriculture in Amazonia: The Soils Perspective

The soils in the Amazon region are essential for the ecosystem sustainability after the clearing of the rainforest for the establishment of the agriculture. In general, the soils have to be viewed as a non-renewable natural resource, especially in the Amazon region where, most of the times, impoverished soils and, sometimes, very fragile soil ecosystems are the basis for an exuberant vegetation. Many times, the lushness of the rainforest derives from the fact that the forest is on a climax in which every nutrient needed by the plants is produced by the recycling of the very own forest. Therefore, the planning of the land clearing and the subsequent use and management of the Amazon region soils for agriculture should be preceded by sound programs of soil classification and land use suitability in order to assure that forest clearing will not take place on unsuitable land for raising crops or food animals.

Mauricio Fontes, a Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University, is Professor at the Universidade Federal de Viçosa in Brazil. He obtained his Ph.D. in Soil Science from North Carolina State University in 1988 where he was invited to become a member of the Phi Kappa Phi and Gamma Sigma Delta honor societies. At that time, he also was recipient of a Potash and Phosphate Institute Fellowship award. He was a Visiting Scholar at University of California Berkeley in 1993/94, at Technische Universitat Munchen in 2000/01 and at Stanford University from 2009/10. He is broadly viewed as one of the leading soil experts within Brazil and has surpassed knowledge of their chemical properties. Professor Fontes has worked for many years on the fate of heavy metals adsorption/desorption phenomena, on establishing geochemical background of heavy metals and assessing soil vulnerability to pollution/contamination to heavy metals of highly weathered/developed soils throughout the country but most notably in the State of Minas Gerais. He has also been working with soils from Amazonia and recently had approved by CNPq (Brazilian Research Funding Agency) a project in “Geochemical Background, Natural Soil Fertility and Nutrient Cycling in Amazonia Soils”. Professor Fontes has published extensively including books, book chapters and papers in journals among others. He serves as a reviewer for several scientific journals and is member of the Editorial Board of ISRN Agronomy. He has been a member of Editorial Board for Revista Ceres and Revista Brasileira de Ciencia do Solo, important Brazilian agronomic journals. He is member of the Soil Science Society of America, of the International Society of Trace Elements Biogeochemistry (ISTEB) and was recently appointed Honorary Member for the International Committee of ICOBTE-2013 (12th International Conference on the Biogeochemistry of Trace Elements) to be held June 16-20, 2013 in Athens, Georgia.