Map Latin America

Your Guides Hola! My name is Anka and this is my friend Naira. Welcome to our home, Latin America.

Latin American has been one of the main providers of natural resources to the world over the last 200 years. Oil, lumber, coffee and minerals like nickel and gold are the main resources we produce for the world.

Working in these industries—especially the gold and nickel mines—is very dangerous. Workers often get hurt and some even die on the job. They aren’t paid very well for their work, but jobs are hard to find so people stay even when it’s dangerous.

Almost 50 million rural Latin American farmers are living in extreme poverty, without the basic things their families need to survive.

The average Latin American is a subsistence farmer. That means they grow just enough food for their families, with a little left over sometimes to sell in the market. Where Naira and I live in the mountains with other indigenous people, it’s hard to grow food because the land and weather aren’t good for farming. Most families are struggling to get by.

The Amazon Rainforest needs environmental protection

Protecting the Rainforest

Sometimes the economy doesn’t consider the environment.

The Amazon Rainforest is the biggest in the world at 2.1 million square miles! People call it the “lungs of our planet” because it supplies the world with 20 percent of our oxygen.

Indigenous people have called the Amazon home for thousands of years. They share the forest with millions of different species of plants, insects and animals that only live in the Amazon. Indigenous medicine men are some of the smartest people in the world because they know how to turn many of these species into special rainforest medicines that can save lives.

“Each time a rainforest medicine man dies, it is as if a library has burned down.”—R.E. Shultes, Rainforest Scientist

Even though I don’t live near the Amazon, I worry because it isn’t safe. The oil and logging industries are cutting down so many trees in the rainforest. If the Amazon isn’t protected, there will be less oxygen to breath and more extinct species. Our environment will suffer.