Crossing spatial analyses and livestock economics to understand deforestation processes in the Brazilian Amazon: the case of São Félix do Xingú in South Pará

The Amazon is the largest tropical forest area on Earth, and has been undergoing rapid deforestation for the last four decades. In the Brazilian Amazon, large‐scale pasture for cattle ranching and soybean production are the main land uses, leading to a yearly deforestation rate of 0.5%. These conversions are mostly located in frontier areas distributed along the so‐called “arc of deforestation”. Within this large zone, various land use change processes are interacting through several modes of land valuation and organisation. From several case studies in the State of Pará (Brazil), the current project aims at analysing how landscape dynamics are related to infrastructure development, ecological conditions, zoning policies and to the evolution and the organisation of the production, consumption and marketing chains of livestock products. This paper presents the results for one test site, the region of São Félix do Xingú, South of Pará This region is the focus of land speculation, cattle expansion, and deforestation. Road construction, investments in electrical energy, financial credit for cattle, and the land reform policies have all fuelled this process. All these factors make this region one of the most dynamic agricultural frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon. The main objective of the paper is to improve our understanding of deforestation processes by crossing spatial analyses and 1ivestock economics.studies, and to characterise the role and impact of various natural and anthropic factors in the location and development of the main types of farmers, and their policy implications.     

Land occupations and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Researchers are increasingly interested in understanding the impact of contentious social processes on land change. In the Brazilian Amazon, there are often contentious interactions between landholders defending private property rights and squatters who have the right to occupy land that is deemed unproductive. Previous studies suggest that the contentious social processes inherent in the Brazilian land tenure and land reform system cause a significant amount of deforestation. An environment of insecure land title, and policies that value deforested land over forested land, among other factors, encourage both landholders and squatters to deforest more land than is necessary for pasture or crop production. This paper examines the impact that land occupations have on deforestation at the municipal scale across the Brazilian Legal Amazon, from 2000 to 2009. We show that land occupations have a direct influence on deforestation. We use spatial analysis as well to show that land occupations have a spatial component in the effect on deforestation: occupations in one municipality affect deforestation in adjacent areas.     

Solving Brazil's land use puzzle: Increasing production and slowing Amazon deforestation

Brazil has become an agricultural powerhouse, producing roughly 30 % of the world’s soy and 15 % of its beef by 2013 – yet historically much of that growth has come at the expense of its native ecosystems. Since 1985, pastures and croplands have replaced nearly 65 Mha of forests and savannas in the legal Amazon. A growing body of work suggests that this paradigm of horizontal expansion of agriculture over ecosystems is outdated and brings negative social and environmental outcomes. Here we propose four strategies that can reduce deforestation, while increasing production and social wellbeing. First, eliminate land grabbing and land speculation through designation of public forests. This would clarify land tenure and limit the pool of land available for uncontrolled expansion of agriculture and ranching. Second, reduce deforestation on private properties by implementing existing mechanisms in Brazil’s Forest Code to facilitate payments for environmental services, with support from market initiatives for sustainable sourcing of agricultural products. Third, incentivize increased productivity on medium and large properties through targeted investments. By stimulating adoption of proven technologies for sustainable intensification, this would help meet Brazil’s production targets and growing international demand for agricultural products, without expanding into new production areas. Finally, foster economic, environmental and social improvements through technical assistance to small farmers. Small farmers occupy a large swath of the Amazon and often lack access to technical assistance, production technology, and markets. Providing quality technical assistance to small farmers could help them better align production practices with local opportunities; increase household income and improve livelihoods; and reduce deforestation pressure. By implementing these four strategies in a coordinated effort between public and private agents, Brazil can show the world how to reduce deforestation while increasing agricultural output, reestablishing its leadership in managing natural resources and mitigating climate change.     

Persistence of cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon: A spatial analysis of the rationale for beef production

Fed by demand for beef within Brazil and in global markets, the Brazilian herd grew from 147 million head of cattle in 1990 to ≈200 million in 2007. Eighty-three percent of this expansion occurred in the Amazon and this trend is expected to continue as the industry bounces back from a recent agricultural downturn. Intensification of the cattle industry has been suggested as one way to reduce pressure on forest margins and spare land for soybean or sugarcane production, and is the cornerstone of Brazil's plan for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. To this end, federal credit programs and research and development activities in Brazil are aligning to support intensification goals, but there is no guarantee that this push for intensification will decrease the demand for land at the forest margin and as result curb CO₂ emissions from deforestation. In this paper we use a spatially explicit rent model which incorporates the local effects of biophysical characteristics, infrastructure, land prices, and distance to markets and slaughterhouses to calculate 30-year Net Present Values (NPVs) of extensive cattle ranching across the Brazilian Amazon. We use the model to ask where extensive ranching is profitable and how land acquisition affects profitability. We estimate that between 17% and 80% of land in the Amazon would have moderate to high NPVs when ranched extensively if it were settled, i.e. if the rancher does not buy the land but acquires it through land grabbing. In addition, we estimate that between 9% and 13% of land in the Amazon is vulnerable to speculation (i.e. areas with positive NPVs only if land is settled and not purchased), which suggests that land speculation is an important driver of extensive ranching profitability, and may continue to be in the future. These results suggest that pro-intensification policies such as credit provision for improved pasture management and investment in more intensive production systems must be accompanied by implementation and enforcement of policies that alter the incentives to clear forest for pasture, discourage land speculation, and increase accountability for land management practices if intensification of the cattle sector is to deter new deforestation and displace production from low-yield, extensive cattle production systems in frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon.     

Forests or fields? A response to the theory that tropical forest conservation poses a threat to the poor

A rebuttal is provided of David Wood's proposal to open up tropical forests to agricultural uses. Concern is raised that his proposal exaggerates the ability of forests to regenerate after agricultural uses, sacrifices tropical forests in the name of alleviating poverty and in support of large land owners, and prevents valuable potential resource use by local populations. There is misunderstanding by Wood of conservationists' postures and the cause of current deforestation. In Brazil, deforestation has occurred primarily for low productivity cattle pasture (62% of all private land in the Amazon region in ranches over 1000 hectares-ha). Only 11% of private Amazonian land was in farms of less than 100 ha; only 30% of this size farm area was involved in 1991 in deforestation, while 70% of deforestation took place on ranches over 100 ha. Mass migrations of Brazil's population from the northeast to the Transamazon Highway and from Parana to Rondonia were impelled by increasing concentration of land tenure in migrant areas, and not by population growth. The rate of deforestation has slowed due to the economic recession. A World Bank study indicates that redistributing unproductive large landholdings in northeastern Brazil would increase agricultural output by 80%. The agricultural productivity of tropic areas is not as assured; Wood's support is based on preliminary findings, which are being revised with more cautionary thinking. Wood also understates the maintenance of soil fertility with fertilizers. The issue of scale also affects the use of agroforestry and perennial crop plantations such as rubber and cacao, which can only absorb the production of small areas, due to marketing constraints and physical resource limitations. Conservationists have not effectively redirected World Bank efforts to protect environments and help the impoverished, as suggested by Wood. Forest recovery has been very slow in large cattle pastures, and would take thousands of years if the land is left undisturbed. Recovery even under traditional shifting cultivation schemes is slower than Wood recognizes. Wood's argument that deforestation is temporary is not sufficient to invalidate the claim for conservation now. Reallocation is really the same as land extensification; current practices in Brazil will not support large human populations. The solution is to develop environmental services and find other means to support rural populations in urban areas.     

Using a Delphi approach to identify the most efficacious interventions to improve Indonesia’s forest and land governance

Improvements to forest and land governance are key to addressing deforestation and degradation of peatlands in Indonesia. While this is a priority area, the steps to achieving good forest and land governance have been under-researched. There is a need for better links between theoretically informed academic analysis and work in the field. This study drew together a panel of experts on forest and land governance using a Delphi method to discuss the underlying drivers of deforestation and peatland degradation, and correspondingly, to identify interventions to improve land and forest governance in Indonesia. Seventeen panelists with an average of more than 12 years’ experience reached agreement over four governance interventions: increasing the capacity of local communities to manage and monitor forests and natural resources (65% of panelist’s votes); identify strengths and weaknesses of community organisations and institutions, and develop strategies to improve their performance (65% of panelist’s votes); gazetting forests to clarify land boundaries and determine which areas should be village, community and state forest zone (59% of panelist’s votes); and, integrating participatory community maps into spatial plans to protect local communities and indigenous peoples’ development needs (53% of panelist’s votes). They also supported action research involving the government, private sector and communities, and political economy approaches to researching forest and land governance issues. Panelists indicated that community level approaches such as securing community forest tenure through clarifying land claims and integrating local land tenure into spatial planning had an important role in sustainable forest management.     

Controlling deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Regional economic impacts and land-use change

Brazil confirmed targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in 2008, including an 80% reduction in deforestation in the Amazon by 2020. With this in mind, we investigated the trade-off between environmental conservation and economic growth in the Amazon. The aim of this study is to project the economic losses and land-use changes resulting from a policy to control deforestation and the rise in land productivity that is necessary to offset those losses. We developed a Dynamic Interregional Computable General Equilibrium Model for 30 Amazon regions with a land module allowing conversion between types of land. The results have shown that the most affected regions would be soybeans and cattle producers as well as regions dominated by family farms. To offset these impacts, it was estimated that an annual gain of land productivity of approximately 1.4% would be required.     

Private property and Mennonites are major drivers of forest cover loss in central Yucatan Peninsula,Mexico

The role of land tenure and Mennonites as drivers of deforestation in the Central Yucatan Peninsula has not been empirically assessed. We evaluate different drivers and their relationship to forest cover change between 1986 and 2015 and assess how land tenure and Mennonite communities impact forest cover loss in the Municipality of Hopelchen, Campeche, Mexico. This study shows that forest cover loss has increased in the last decade (2005–2015), and that land tenure regime type is associated with this loss. Throughout the study period, statistical comparisons show rates of forest cover loss were significantly higher in private and federal property compared to forests in ejidos (communal property). Forest cover loss in Mennonite private property was also significantly higher than in non-Mennonite owned private property. The role of land tenure and the expansion of the agroindustrial production model as major drivers of forest cover loss in the region provide important insight into developing municipal land use plans and conservation strategies to reduce deforestation. Programs, incentives and policy directed towards forest conservation in the region that typically target ejido communities, will need to consider the growing trend of private property expansion within federal lands and work more closely with private property owners including Mennonite communities if deforestation reduction programs are to be successful.     

The agricultural,environmental and socio-political repercussions of Brazil's land governance system

Although many contemporary studies of agriculture associate larger properties with higher relative productivity, this assumption has limited relevancy for the analysis of situations in which property owners profit more from large-scale property accumulation itself rather than any superiority in exploitation opportunities offered by increased size. In Brazil, the efficiency-of-scale paradigm has been used to criticize peasant agriculture as unproductive and hide contradictions deriving from land concentration. As this paper argues, however, small-scale agriculture is actually responsible for most of Brazil's food production, rural employment and agricultural income. The paper utilizes a land governance perspective to analyze the implementation of structural reforms aimed at turning back the land monopolization tide as well as efforts to weaken long-standing legal principles that socially condition individual property “rights” in Brazil.     

Are capacity deficits in local government leaving the Amazon vulnerable to environmental change?

The last 20 years have seen remarkable progress in monitoring and modelling environmental change in the Amazon region. As a result, scientists and policy makers now have robust and spatially explicit knowledge and forecasts of critical phenomena such as deforestation and bioclimatic uncertainty. However, whether this knowledge is used to support the implementation of policies and initiatives to cope with environmental changes in the Amazon depends on the ability of the political institutions to proactively integrate the scientific evidence into land planning at multiple spatial scales. In Brazil, municipalities are constitutionally responsible for legislating on land planning and therefore have a power to significantly influence the future trajectory of environmental change. Here, we assess the environmental capacity of municipalities in the Brazilian legal Amazon based on data from a self-assessment survey and from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics database. Municipalities generally have a low level of institutional capacity and there is no evidence that the municipalities most at threat from environmental change are taking proactive measures to reduce their vulnerability. We argue that structural reforms and capacity raising initiatives are urgently needed, especially in smaller, less economically developed municipalities located in areas at high risk of imminent environmental change.     

The Brazilian Cattle Sector: Status, Prospects and Controversies

The cattle sector in Brazil (and in other countries of South America) is substantial in terms of size and potential impacts in world markets. Due to the sheer magnitude and potential of the Brazilian cattle sector, it merits our attention. A trend to more productive cattle systems, new rules for trade in livestock products and more effective control of hoof and mouth disease in some areas of Brazil could cause it to become a more formidable beef exporter. Brazil also warrants attention because of the controversial practice of deforestation for cattle production in the Amazon rain forest. A vocal environmental lobby has decried cattle production in the Amazon, but this practice continues. This paper reviews the status, prospects and controversies of the beef sector in Brazil, with a special focus on deforestation and cattleproduction in tropical ecosystems.     

From “Green Hell” to “Amazonia Legal”: Land use models and the re-imagination of the rainforest as a new development frontier

Critical scholars have addressed land use models and related technologies by pointing to their epistemological underpinnings and the social consequences of visibilities and invisibilities induced by these instruments to different forms of governance. More recently, in addition to reaffirming the old dictum that the map is not the territory, some scholars have analyzed how land use models can shape perceptions, narratives and policy, and in this way “make” the territory and the state. In this study, we adopt the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries to highlight the role of land use models and basin-wide development schemes in the emergence of military developmentalism in the Brazilian Amazon. We show that earlier surveys of the Amazon were created in order to substantiate territorial claims and to guide the exploitation of natural rubber and other extractive resources. Mapping of the rivers as arteries with limited upland assessment implied a view of the Amazon as an immutable and invincible nature where resources were given as elements of natural landscapes. The approach of economic sectorial mapping that had dominated earlier surveys began to shift during and especially after World War II in an effort to imagine Amazonia as a separate and identifiable policy space which transformation would be possible with the application of development frameworks, such as the one derived from Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Likewise, experts from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization played a key role in providing land use models and assessment that “proved” the economic viability of large-scale colonization projects. This article points out that the extensive occupation and ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest was also informed by US large-scale planning regimes infused with technoscientific approaches derived mostly from Global North scientific institutions. Those concepts underpinned imaginaries of an integrated region whose “planning surface” would be oriented by the idea of the “Legal Amazon”, subject to a technocratic, centralized and authoritarian style of developmentalism. In this way this paper shows how land use models are not mere representations of the territory but also carriers of sociotechnical imaginaries that coproduce radical changes in social and natural landscapes.     

Public policies can reduce tropical deforestation: Lessons and challenges from Brazil

Reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation now constitutes an important strategy for mitigating climate change, particularly in developing countries with large forests. Given growing concerns about global climate change, it is all the more important to identify cases in which economic growth has not sparked excessive forest clearance. We address the recent reduction of deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon by conducting a statistical analysis to ascertain if different levels of environmental enforcement between two groups of municipalities had any impact on this reduction. Our analysis shows that these targeted, heightened enforcement efforts avoided as much as 10,653 km² of deforestation, which translates into 1.44 × 10⁻¹ Pg C in avoided emissions for the 3 y period. Moreover, most of the carbon loss and land conversion would have occurred at the expense of closed moist forests. Although such results are encouraging, we caution that significant challenges remain for Brazil's continued success in this regard, given recent changes in the forestry code, ongoing massive investments in hydro power generation, reductions of established protected areas, and growing demand for agricultural products.     

Mapping properties to monitor forests: Landholder response to a large environmental registration program in the Brazilian Amazon

Across the tropics, development banks and conservation donors are investing millions in property mapping and registration projects to improve accountability for deforestation. An evaluation of the effectiveness and accuracy of existing environmental registries is crucial to assure the success of future efforts. This study presents an evaluation of deforestation and registration behavior in response to one of the largest of these property registration programs to date — the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) in the Amazonian state of Pará. From late 2007 to 2013, approximately 100,000 properties covering 30 million hectares of self-declared claims were entered in this digital registry. We used fixed effects regression models and property level data to assess how registration influenced deforestation on different sizes of properties. Registration had little impact on deforestation behavior, with the exception of a significant reduction on “smallholder” properties in the size range of 100–300 ha. We link this reduction to interacting incentives from forest protection and land regularization policies and suggest that desire to strengthen land claims motivates these landholders’ response to the environmental registry. We also present evidence that some landholders may be registering incomplete or inaccurate parcels into the self-declared system to strategically benefit from policy incentives. Our results for smallholder properties indicate that environmental registries may have potential to facilitate reductions in deforestation if combined with a favorable combination of incentives. However, in places where land tenure is still being negotiated, the utility of environmental registries for forest policy enforcement and research may be limited without ongoing investment to resolve uncertainty around land claims.     

Large-scale agricultural investments under poor land governance in Zambia

This paper looks at how large-scale land acquisitions made by foreign investors in Zambia are implemented. It scrutinizes both the steps that an investor has to go through in order to attain land within the Zambian land governance system as well as the actors shaping the acquisition process.As the most important formal change introduced to the Zambian land governance system, the Lands Act 1995 paved the way for foreign investments in land. The new actor “investor” on the other hand has emerged as a result of rising prices for food and non-food commodities. The study finds that the enforcement of formal rules in the process of acquiring land is currently weak and largely determined by a number of actors: while investors, local authorities and government officials have strong leverage, local land users are excluded from the process. If the process of transformations of customary land into state land continues, land administration will be inevitably shifted toward statutory jurisdiction. As a result, local chiefs will lose their discretionary power thereby further marginalizing local land users. As it stands, welfare implications are chiefly down to the individual actors. However, it is only the government that can issue a guarantee that local land users will also benefit from land acquisition.     

Livestock intensification as a climate policy: Lessons from the Brazilian case

Brazil is trying to identify ways to ally economic growth with climate change mitigation. Productivity gains in livestock have been pointed out as a promising alternative to achieve that goal. Thus, this paper analyses the economic impacts of a policy of productivity gains in the Brazilian livestock. Besides, we evaluate if the policy may conciliate agricultural growth and deforestation control, bearing in mind the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land-use changes. The analysis was carried out through a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, tailored to represent land-use changes, GHG emissions and removals. Besides, it made progress modeling the heterogeneity of climate, soils, and emissions in inter-regional models with many regions. The results show that productivity gains can effectively “save” land and thus avoid deforestation, especially in the Amazon and Cerrado (savannah) biomes. The policy also may boost the economic growth, spreading it to other regions of Brazil, like Centre-West and North, and increasing income and consumption in those places. However, as a climate policy, focused on the reduction of GHG emissions, the results may be counterproductive. The net amount issued may increase, as a result of the positive stimulus of the policy on the economy, and GHG emissions are directly related to the economic growth.     

Monitoring land governance: Understanding roots and shoots

Despite a growing interest among land use policymakers to identify the indicators that measure changes in land tenure systems, little consensus exists about what framework can functionally analyze land tenure systems, and how it should be developed. The existing indicators have mainly focused on measuring the “effects” of land tenure (in)security and often neglected the “causes”. Hence, comprehensive monitoring of land tenure systems has been poorly understood and practiced. Given their multifaceted meanings, land and its related concepts have been a challenging issue for policymakers. Accordingly, the overall objective of this paper was to propose a functional and analytical framework on how to study monitoring land governance from roots to shoots through five main studies: i) understanding the historical trajectories of land, ii) recognizing institutional arrangements on land, iii) identifying land governance grammar, iv) defining land governance typology, and v) assessing land use changes. In line with this objective, the general research question of this study is how and by whom a monitoring system should be developed. Overall, this study can be considered as a conceptual framework that has been designed to conceptualize, develop, build, and apply a functional and analytical framework for formulating land governance grammar to explain how access to land is governed. Unlike previous studies, this study focuses on both causes and effects of strong land governance (SLG) and weak land governance (WLG). The paper discusses that land governance allows various stakeholders to participate in government decisions and ensures the security of their livelihoods. However, land governance could be either poor or strong depending on the government decision-making process. The paper also concluded that SLG is a precondition for economic growth and poverty alleviation in rural areas of developing countries.     

Drivers and projections of vegetation loss in the Pantanal and surrounding ecosystems

Modeling scenarios can help identify drivers of and potential changes in land use, particularly in rapidly changing landscapes such as the tropics. One of the places where most of the recent anthropogenic land use changes have been occurring is the "arc of deforestation" of the Amazon, where several scenarios have been constructed. Such modeling scenarios, however, have been implemented less frequently in wetland areas, but these are also undergoing rapid change. An example is the Pantanal, one of the largest wetlands on the planet located in the Upper Paraguay River Basin (UPRB). The UPRB is formed by the lowland (Pantanal) and the plateau (Cerrado and Amazon where the spring-fed rivers are). We used a spatially explicit model to identify drivers of vegetation loss in the Pantanal and surrounding area (UPRB) and estimated potential vegetation loss for the next 30 years. The model is probabilistic and considers that vegetation loss is contagious, so that the local rate of deforestation increases over time if adjacent sites are deforested, also taking into account the drivers identified in those locations. Our study is the first to simulate vegetation loss at property-scale, over 20,000 properties, for the entire UPRB in Brazil, taking into account the relationship between the plateau, where headwaters are located, and the lowland, where flooded-areas are concentrated. The drivers of vegetation loss identified for the lowland (distance to roads and rivers and elevation) differed from those for the plateau (distance to cities), demonstrating the relevance of analyzing areas separately. The cumulative rate of native vegetation loss projected for 2050 was 3% for the lowland and 10% for the plateau, representing losses of 6045 km² and of native vegetation area decreasing from 87% to 83% and 7960 km² from 39% to 35% respectively by 2050, if changes continue at the same pace and if the environmental legislation is followed. The projected vegetation loss in the UPRB forms a geographical arc, very similar to that observed in the Amazon, from the plateau into the lowland. The arc is directly related to areas with no or low flooding frequency because they are suitable for agriculture. The identification of this arc of vegetation loss calls for urgent conservation policies for this wetland and new perspectives for management.     

Why have land use change models for the Amazon failed to capture the amount of deforestation over the last decade?

Land cover change in the Neotropics represents one of the major drivers of global environmental change. Several models have been proposed to explore future trajectories of land use and cover change, particularly in the Amazon. Despite the remarkable development of these tools, model results are still surrounded by uncertainties. None of the model projections available in the literature plausibly captured the overall trajectory of land use and cover change that has been observed in the Amazon over the last decade. In this context, this study aims to review and analyze the general structure of the land use models that have most recently been used to explore land use change in the Amazon, seeking to investigate methodological factors that could explain the divergence between the observed and projected rates, paying special attention to the land demand calculations. Based on this review, the primary limitations inherent to this type of model and the extent to which these limitations can affect the consistency of the projections will also be analyzed. Finally, we discuss potential drivers that could have influenced the recent dynamic of the land use system in the Amazon and produced the unforeseen land cover change trajectory observed in this period. In a complementary way, the primary challenges of the new generation of land use models for the Amazon are synthesized.     

Potential hazards of land policy: Conservation,rural development and fire use in the Brazilian Amazon

With growing awareness of fire hazard as an environmental threat within tropical rainforests, the state of Brazil initiated a set of fire control policies aimed at monitoring and ameliorating fire hazard in the Amazon region. These policies were developed in the aftermath of large-scale fire events and reflect a conservationist discourse that responded to internal as well as international environmental concerns. In doing so, the policies have framed the “fire problem” around those who use fire in their land use practices, in particular small-scale agriculturalists. Yet, land policy in general has repeatedly failed to address the institutional arrangements which compel small-scale farmers to use fire in their agricultural practices and the underlying development processes that have made the landscape more vulnerable to accidental spread of fire. Using regional level data on small-scale farmers, I suggest that the conservation oriented approach of fire policy may not be enough to curtail accidental fire events and instead that the fire issue needs to be positioned within rural development as well.