Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Unlike Peru’s coastal strip, Ecuador’s is not a desert: it consists of fertile tropical plains not afflicted by excessive rainfall. Seafood (especially shrimp) is a leading product, and these lowlands support a thriving commercial agricultural economy built around bananas, cacao, cattle raising, and coffee on the hillsides. Moreover, Ecuador’s western subregion is also far less Europeanized because this white component of the national population is only about one-third the size of Peru’s. A greater proportion of whites are engaged in administration and hacienda ownership in the central Andean zone, where most of the Ecuadorians who are indigenous also reside--and, not surprisingly, where land-tenure reform is an explosive issue. The differing interests of the Guayaquil-dominated coastal lowland and the Andean-highland subregion focused on the capital (Quito) have long fostered a deep regional cleavage between the two. This schism has not lessened in recent years, and autonomy and other devolutionary remedies often are openly discussed in the coastlands. In the rainforests of the Oriente subregion, oil production is expanding as a result of the discovery of additional reserves."