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Amazonian Rainforest

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From the outside, Ecuador looks like a prosperous country. Its top exports include shrimp and oil, and it is the number one producer of bananas in the world. If you walked into a local market, you would be overcome with the variety of foods, colors, and smells. According to Britannica, Ecuador is also among the most diverse countries in the world, being one of nine countries to house the Amazonian Rainforest, as well as two deserts and four mountain ranges. While this country, 400 square miles smaller than the U.S. state of Nevada, seems to face little difficulty, it is the most food insecure and fifth most corrupt country in South America according to the Food Security Index and Transparency Intl. surveys in 2015. The problem lies buried six …show more content…

Since 1822, Ecuador has hosted a battery of presidents and governments, each lasting an average of under 3 years. The elected leaders within Ecuador have faced significant social and economic problems on top of the existing political issues. While Ecuador has always been traditionally agriculturally centered, the discovery of oil in the 1960s caused a massive boom in technology, innovation, and commercialization. The rapid growth, combined with low petroleum prices and environmental damage from El Nino created mass inflation. The value of the sucre, or Ecuadorian dollar, decreased over sixty percent, causing the government to replace it with the U.S. dollar on January 9, 2000. This was only a short term solution, however, as the U.S. dollar and Ecuador’s economy has become more inflated. The average family today lives off of a subsistence farm, growing a majority of their own food and raising some sort of animal including sheep, cows, or chickens. In Hungry Planet, an Ecuadorian family of 10 lived off of about $32 a …show more content…

dollars per day - well below the international poverty line. Ecuador’s lack of strong internal institutions and government has led to poverty and malnourishment. One effective way to solve this issue is for the government to issue a series of laws reinforcing the ideals that other countries or large corporations may not be able to come in and take away Ecuador’s resources. Instead, they should invest in educating their people and creating jobs within the country, rather that outside ‘help’. This may also include raising taxes on imported items, which would allow Ecuadorian locals to sell products at more reasonable prices while forcing companies based in a different country to pay a bit more. Instead of focusing on immediately relieving the debt accruement through loans and deals with foreign governments, Ecuador should pursue investing in local infrastructure. While this may take a few years, and other countries, such as China, may pressure them into deals or payments, it is integral that Ecuadorian officials remain steadfast in the decisions they make or else they face both an economic and a governmental collapse. This will boost jobs within Ecuador, decreasing poverty rates. Finally, by demoting clan-based thinking, in which people are more likely to hire family members, and increasing education, the GDP will be raised, inflation will decrease, and the government itself will become less corrupt. It is integral that while

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