Rural-to-urban migration is a worldwide phenomenon and the Amazon is no exception. Nonetheless, a very large proportion of its immigrants are small farmers who originally came from the High Andes and Northeastern Brazil, wagering their future on the frontier landscapes of the Pan Amazon. This flow of people into rural communities slowed dramatically after about 2000, when rural families began to move their primary place of residence to urban centers. In Brazil and Bolivia, they tend to move to Amazonian cities, large and small; in Amazonian Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, however, they are more likely to move to cities in the highlands or on the coast.

In Brazil, the relative proportion of rural and urban residents in the Legal Amazon was approximately equivalent before 1990; however, by 2000 more than seventy per cent of residents resided in what the national census bureau considers urban areas. Most of the rural-to-urban migration has flowed to the six largest metropolitan centers: Manaus, Belem/Ananindeua, São Luiz, Cuiabá/Varzea Grande, Porto Velho and Macapá/Santana.

There has been a similar expansion of intermediate and small cities, many of which are the administrative centers for municipalities renowned for their role in agricultural supply chains (Itaitatuba [AM], Sorriso, Sinop [MT], Tailândia [PA], Ji-Paraná [RO]), corporate mines (Marabá, Parauapebas, Oriximiná [PA]), wildcat mining towns (Itaituba [PA], Pontes e Lacerda (MT), or cattle landscapes renowned for high rates of deforestation (Altamira, São Félix do Xingu [PA], Humaita [AM]). Most doubled their populations between 2000 and 2010 and have been growing at two to three per cent annually over the last decade, a trend that has been replicated in the large and small town categories that are at the heart of the rural economy of the Brazilian Amazon.

The Bolivian Amazon has the highest immigration rates of any Amazonian jurisdiction, but this statistic is skewed by the phenomenal growth of the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, which has ballooned from about 100,000 residents in 1970 to more than 2.5 million in 2022. Other municipalities that have experienced significant inflows include San Ignacio de Velasco (Santa Cruz), Yapacaní (Santa Cruz), Ivirgarzama (Cochabamba), Cobija (Pando), Riberalta (Beni), Palos Blancos and Caranavi (La Paz). All are located on the agricultural frontier and experience very high rates of deforestation.

In Peru, efforts to promote migration into the Amazon are offset by the economic pull of Lima and other coastal cities; consequently, the Amazonian population has been expanding slightly above the national rate for the last decade (about 1.4 per cent). The observed expansion of the population of the Peruvian Amazon is the consequence of a relatively high birth rate, because emigration currently exceeds immigration in all but one of the lowland departments. Madre de Dios, the site of an ongoing gold rush, is the outlier, as its population has increased by about five per cent annually over the last decade. Most of the newcomers are rural residents working in mining camps.

In the rest of lowland Peru, there is a consistent migration of people from the countryside into regional cities and towns; the rural communities of Loreto have approximately the same population today as in 2000, while its capital city, Iquitos, has experienced only modest growth, increasing from 360,000 to 423,000 inhabitants between 2007 and 2020 (1% annually). Higher growth rates are reported for Pucallpa (2.5%) and Yurimaguas (4.1%), both of which are terminus cities for trunk highways. Regardless, the number of emigrants from Ucayali since 2000 has exceeded immigrants; most are probably young people moving to Lima.

Amazonian Ecuador has the highest population growth rate of any region of the country, with a ten-year mean that is approximately double the national average (4% vs. 2%). This apparently is due to a higher birth rate, because migration into the region has essentially stopped, with only 1.3% of respondents self-identifying as immigrants in the 2010 census. The relatively high birth rates and slow pace of inward migration are juxtaposed with the lagging pace of urbanization, as only 29% (compared to 59% nationally) of the region’s residents living in what the census bureau defines as a city or town.

In the Colombian Amazon, civil violence pushed millions of rural families into cities. The population of Caquetá fell by 50,000 people between 1993 and 2005, while the town of Florencia expanded by 33,000; tens of thousands more fled to safe havens such as Villavicencio, Huila and Bogotá. The military campaign (Plan Colombia) and the 2016 peace agreement changed this dynamic, and Caquetá has been growing at about 3% annually over the last decade. The increase in population is driven largely by a land rush and economic boom, with settlers and rural investors attracted by cheap land being commercialized by land grabbers in one of the Amazon’s most lawless frontiers. Ironically, local population centers have grown only marginally with this new migratory wave, but if trends from other forest frontiers hold true, they will soon experience another population boom.

Historically, the Guiana Shield region has a stable, largely urban population, with most inhabitants residing in cities on the Orinoco River in Venezuela or on the coastal plain of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Census data might not accurately reflect the number of people in the gold fields, which have experienced local population booms due to the influx of Brazilian and Venezuelan gold miners in the last decade.

Guyana suffered from a mass exodus during the last half of the twentieth century. Slightly more than half of its native-born citizens – 750,000 individuals – have left the country since 1970. The emigration rate declined from highs of near 15,000 per year in the late 1980s to around 5,000 in the last decade. Most emigrants currently reside in the United States and Canada, but it is not uncommon to maintain a second home and support family members. Between 2015 and 2020, the total value of remittances ranged from $300 million to $500 million, approximately half of the revenue from the wildcat gold mining sector.

A similar but less acute phenomenon has impacted the population in neighboring Suriname, where about 250,000 citizens have emigrated, mainly to the Netherlands. Emigration has slowed to fewer than 1,000 citizens per year, which is approximately equal to the number of individuals immigrating or returning to Suriname.

Banner Image: The Ribeirinho communities, located on the main course of the Amazon and Solimões rivers between Iquitos and Belém, can trace their demographic history back to the ethnic groups that inhabited the river and its tributaries before the arrival of European missionaries, as well as traders, soldiers, adventurers, rubber tappers, and runaway slaves who migrated to the floodplain over the past four centuries. Credit: © Brarymi / Shutterstock.

“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).

To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.