The forest is the world itself in its cosmological and religious dimension. For all the populations we will be looking at here, the forest is both what one is attracted to and what one fears. The degree to which a group is involved in its national monetary and commercial economy is, obviously, what provokes changes in traditional subsistence techniques, some of which can still be seen today. In any case, one can find examples of all the different stages of this process of change, from groups of traditional mobile hunter-gatherers to sedentary groups who have adopted agriculture. In fact, most swidden cultivators supplement their diet with many wild products .
Agriculture provides quantity and the forest provides quality to daily diet.
These non-timber forest products are of course exploited for the requirements of the local ethnic group, but usually they are to some extent also integrated in the trade networks. These are the products which development specialists are increasingly interested in, because they seem to offer new solutions for a more rational and diversified use of the forest ecosystem. The same can be said of the major societies organized into hierarchies that lived in the flood plains of the Amazon Basin until they were destroyed by the Conquest. They had developed trade links with the forest populations of the hinterland that provided them with wild forest products. Throughout the centuries, these associations between different populations have enabled people to set up vast networks of long distance trade that linked them with the developed countries beyond the equatorial zone.