Land Use & Foreign Capital Investments in Ecuador
Ecuador
By Tait Mandler; Gamar Markarian; Alexandra (Zanny) Venner
foreign investment, agriculture, development, ecuador
To understand land-use in Ecuador in relationship to its agriculture production and the influence and involvement of foreign investment.
Given that Ecuador does not have an open-data source, this project required lots of hunting in order to gather the data that seemed necessary. This included going through academic papers, reports, and government excel spreadsheets in order to create data that could be joined with the provincial shape file.
We made one spreadsheet to compile all the information that was necessary to create maps based on agriculture production units, property size, land-use and population. We normalized the data eventually joining it to the shapefile oh the provinces of Ecuador
As part of our background research and investigation process, we created a series of maps to help us understand agriculture in Ecuador. For example, we were able to spatialize the number of agricultural production units within a specific farmland scale in the provinces of Ecuador’s Sierra and Coastal region.
The agriculture production unit map series & property sizes helped us to understand where the concentration of different agriculture units lie in Ecuador from 1-10 Hectares, 10-50 Hectares, 50 Plus hectares.
Further, we also created a land-use map from a source called “Land Conflict in Ecuador”. This is a map based on Ecuador’s Agricultural land-use activity.
When read separately, these series of maps helped us to better understand a variety of agriculture relationships in Ecuador. However, given that we struggled to combine a few of our key sources together, we used these maps as background information in order to create a complimentary map: foreign investments in Ecuador.
As the final submission for our project, this map was important for us to create because we wanted to understand who is influencing and shaping Ecuador’s large scale land activity. Within the past decade, Ecuador has been experimenting with new forms of development to search for alternative forms of development besides the infamous extraction of its raw materials. According to the Ecuadorian government, this requires utilizing its rich natural resources in other forms and requires serious multinational loans to finance many mega-backed energy projects. China is Ecuador’s greatest supporter and has invested 13 Billion (generally quoted in many resources) from 2007-2013.
Interestingly, the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, a democratic socialist, and his administration focused on the implementation of leftist policies, poverty reduction, and combating the influence of the United States and multinational corporations in Ecuador. One would assume the country would not welcome any foreign capital investments, but in 2014, Ecuador re-thought its multinational relation to the World Bank.
All of this data informed our final map product. The process involved researching, hand-drawing, georectifying, and then later turning the data into a an excel sheet for cartodb.
CartoDB:
For our CartoDB Foreign Investment map we wanted to have a more interactive map that could include more information about foreign investments in Ecuador. The data we thought was important to show was: investment amount, financial backer, type of project, name of project, and a timeline of the projects. We did this with two maps, a category map with the points scaled logarithmically to the amount of money invested and a torque map that shows the progression of investment over time.
Importantly, we should note that these are only the projects for which we could find specific geographic data, more foreign investments exist that we were unable to spatialize.