Why les tristes tropiques have become the world's major sump of poverty has been analyzed from various perspectives, producing varying judgments on the complicity of the foreign powers who had “opened up” the tropics to foreign settlement, trade and investment. This volume's basic theses are that ecological degradation from the expansion of tropical agricultural and silvicultural exports have been a major source of socioeconomic damage to the tropics and that, especially in the past century, U.S. consumer demand and enterprise have dominated the external forces propelling this adverse dynamic.