Brazil's New Green Revolution: Capital, Investment, and Agricultural Expansion

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

The Brazilian Amazon, long viewed as vital to the maintenance of global environmental balances, has now also become one of the world's most rapidly growing agricultural frontiers. Since 1990, broad-acre agricultural systems, led by favorable conditions for soybean production, have expanded by more than 80,000km² in the emerging production frontiers in Brazil's Center-West and Northern regions. The growth of soybean production in these areas has come with both economic benefits and environmental costs; and this region is poised to continue growing as a production center. Where and to what extent this expansion takes place will have enormous consequences not only for broader scale questions of environmental sustainability and food supplies, but also locally, as rapidly developing agricultural counties attempt to balance the potential returns from agriculture with maintaining a healthy and sustainable environment. Intellectual Merit: This research considers a key aspect of Brazil's agricultural transformation. The focus is on the role of capital generation and credit scarcity in constraining and shaping the location and extent of Brazil's agricultural growth. Specifically, how people and capital are redistributed from sources of capital generation to capital scarce, marginal regions and how land managers' investments are constrained to self-financing on past returns or peer to peer exchanges based on agricultural futures. The question how land managers choose between multiple investment pathways as capital becomes available or, specifically, whether they seek to (1) intensify on already productive parcels through double (or even triple) cropping systems, or (2)seek out and convert existing pastures or forests in new locations to cropland is also addressed. The work is approached by conceptualizing the issue at hand within an interdisciplinary model built on theories from geography, economics, and migration studies. The research plan includes the collection of quantifiable survey data and qualitative interviews conducted in three, strategically-located study agricultural frontier regions. Whereas the survey work aims at establishing quantitative, population-level relationships, the qualitative work attempts to gather more specific information on the processes that underlie this relationship. To set the responses with a spatial and physical structure, the projects links field information to location-specific data through a GIS. In summary, the main intellectual merits of this work include (1) an innovative, interdisciplinary conceptual approach to understanding the movement of people and their resources, and (2) the integration of socioeconomic survey of broad-acre farmers with MODIS satellite image based data products indicating land use intensity with GIS data. Broader Impacts: The BROADER IMPACTS of this proposal comprise (1) a policy oriented evaluation of area specific constraints on land intensification across three critical agricultural frontiers; (2) Professional growth of the Fellow (Richards), which includes administering and developing the research project and new training in migration studies and survey methods; and (3) the continued development of a research network that that includes scientists at multiple US and Brazilian institutions. This project is co-funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE).