Daniel Joseph Hogan

Abstract

The steel and petrochemical complex of Cubatao, on the Atlantic coast 40 km from the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, became in the 1970s and 1980s a symbol of environmental disaster. Built in the period of rapid import-substitution industrial-ization of the 1950s and 1960s, Cubatao's industrial complex developed without consi-deration of geographic features which concentrated air and water pollution. Effects on deforestation, geologic destabilization, poisoning of mangrove swamps and on the health of local residents were ignored until the early 1980s. This paper describes this process and identifies in a series of specific migration mechanisms part of the ex-planation of the delay in dealing with this serious problem.

Keywords: population, poverty, pollution, deforestation, Cubatao

Daniel Joseph Hogan, Population Studies Center-Nepo, State University of Campinas, 13081-971 Campinas-SP, Brazil