Maria del Carmen Vera-Diaz

ABSTRACT Agriculture in Amazonia has often provoked controversy, given the tremendous ecological value of the region's environment. First with ranching, and now with the soybean boom, tractors and cattle have marched across lands that for millennia supported only closed moist forest, resident ecosystems, and dispersed indigenous peoples. The present chapter considers this expansion, focusing on the Brazilian portion of the basin. Its premise is that effective Amazonian policy must be grounded on an understanding of the region's agriculture. The chapter pursues its objectives by first addressing the development initiatives that created the preconditions for Amazonia's current agricultural economy. The region is remote and has therefore required sustained government intervention to release its potential. The policy discussion is followed by descriptions of cattle ranching and soy farming. For each, market settings and trajectories of expansion are presented. Although these sectoral descriptions are data rich, they do not provide a conceptual framework for analyzing the environmental impacts of evolving market conditions. To accomplish this, the chapter invokes the classical land use model of von Thünen to explain Amazonian land cover dynamics in relation to soy-cattle linkages. It addresses these dynamics with remote sensing data from Mato Grosso, Pará, and Rondônia, and then discusses scenarios of agricultural advances on the forest. Conclusions follow, considering possible policy responses to deforestation, and the social context of agricultural intensification, with special attention to the issues of land tenure security and distributional equity.

Abstract We explore the welfare implications of agricultural expansion in the Brazilian Amazon by comparing spatially explicit estimates of soybean rents and the value of ecosystem services. Although these estimates are generated from different datasets, ...

... Four of the identified axes include areas within Legal Amazonia-Araguaia-Tocantins,Madeira-Amazonas, Arco Norte, and Centro-Oeste.20 (Figure 2 on page 39 maps these targeted regions.) However, a closer analysis reveals that once again the main beneficiaries are not ...

Understory fires, which burn the floor of standing forests, are one of the most important types of forest impoverishment in the Amazon, especially during the severe droughts of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) episodes. However, the authors are aware of no estimates of the areal extent of these fires for the Brazilian Amazon and, hence, of their contribution to Amazon carbon fluxes to the atmosphere. In this paper, the area of forest understory fires for the Brazilian Amazon region is calculated during an El Niño (1998) and a non–El Niño (1995) year based on forest fire scars mapped with satellite images for three locations in eastern and southern Amazonia, where deforestation is concentrated. The three study sites represented a gradient of both forest types and dry season severity. The burning scar maps were used to determine how the percentage of forest that burned varied with distance from agricultural clearings. These spatial functions were then applied to similar forest/clim...

... Os Custos Econômicos Associados às Queimadas e Incêndios Florestais ... A grande variação desta estimativa é devido às incertezas sobre a área de floresta afetada pelo fogo adicionando aí as incertezas sobre o efeito do incêndio florestal no estoque de carbono da floresta. ...

... Four of the identified axes include areas within Legal Amazonia-Araguaia-Tocantins,Madeira-Amazonas, Arco Norte, and Centro-Oeste.20 (Figure 2 on page 39 maps these targeted regions.) However, a closer analysis reveals that once again the main beneficiaries are not ...

The objective of this study is to investigate the cost of the use of fire in the Amazon. Burnings are commonplace in the Amazon production process and contribute towards the region's agricultural expansion. Fire is used by farmers in the land preparation process and in clearing forest ...

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