The role of pasture and soybean in deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon

By E. Barona, Navin Ramankutty, Glenn Hyman, Oliver T. Coomes. 2010

638 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The dynamics of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon are complex. A growing debate considers the extent to which deforestation is a result of the expansion of the Brazilian soy industry. Most recent analyses suggest that deforestation is driven by the expansion of cattle ranching, rather than soy. Soy seems to be replacing previously deforested land and/or land previously under pasture. In this study, we use municipality-level statistics on agricultural and deforested areas across the Legal Amazon from 2000 to 2006 to examine the spatial patterns and statistical relationships between deforestation and changes in pasture and soybean areas. Our results support previous studies that showed that deforestation is predominantly a result of pasture expansion. However, we also find support for the hypothesis that an increase of soy in Mato Grosso has displaced pasture further north, leading to deforestation elsewhere. Although not conclusive, our findings suggest that the debate surrounding the drivers of Amazon deforestation is not over, and that indirect causal links between soy and deforestation may exist that need further exploration. Future research should examine more closely how interlinkages between land area, prices, and policies influence the relationship between soy and deforestation, in order to make a conclusive case for ‘displacement deforestation’.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2060d714ba80730f4943f90fd37742a87cdb9a59

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Citations in the corpus

Statistical confirmation of indirect land use change in the Brazilian Amazon (2011, background): “Further, statistical analysis has been highly suggestive of a northward displacement of cattle by soy production (Barona et al 2010).”
System complexity and policy integration challenges: The Brazilian Energy- Water-Food Nexus (2019, background): “It could potentially occupy land currently used for soybean crops or cattle, depending on prices, and trigger ever more complex cascades of ILUC and deforestation [46].”
Enhancing the sustainability of commodity supply chains in tropical forest and agricultural landscapes (2013, background): “Detailed information concerning the trends in commodity production, and the association between these trends and tropical deforestation are discussed extensively in the peer-reviewed literature on cattle (e.g. Nepstad et al., 2006; Barona et al., 2010; Cederberg et al., 2011; Bustamante et al., 2012”
Exchange Rates, Soybean Supply Response, and Deforestation in South America (2012, background): “It follows that as incentives for agricultural production in the Amazon increase, new lands are likely to be brought into production, presumably at the expense of existing pastures or natural land covers (Barona et al., 2010, Arima et al., 2011, Richards, 2011b).”
Decoupling of deforestation and soy production in the southern Amazon during the late 2000s (2012, background): “The frontier states of MT, Rondônia, and Pará accounted for 85% of all Amazon deforestation from 1996 to 2005, converting an average of 16,600 km2·y−1 of forest (11).”
The potential of insect protein to reduce food-based carbon footprints in Europe: The case of broiler meat production (2021, background): “…also an ingredient that can contribute to negative environmental impacts in broiler feed production, for example due to its land use (e.g., Fearnside, 2001; Barona et al., 2010; Salomone et al., 2017), as well as through contributing negatively to social sustainability measures (Jia et al., 2020).”
Trajectories of deforestation, coffee expansion and displacement of shifting cultivation in the Central Highlands of Vietnam (2013, positive): “Yet, this expansion of soybean may have driven deforestation indirectly by 631 displacing pastures further in the Amazon forest (Barona et al. 2010, Arima et al. 2011).”
Land use patterns and related carbon losses following deforestation in South America (2015, background): “Other research that links forest loss or forest carbon emissions to drivers used aggregated continental scale (Geist and Lambin 2002,Hosonuma et al 2012, Houghton 2012) or local scale data (Morton et al 2006, Barona et al 2010, Clark et al 2010, Müller et al 2012, 2014, Gibbs et al 2015).”
Relationship between openness to trade and deforestation: : Empirical evidence from the Brazilian Amazon (2016, background): “…been extensively studied (Reis and Guzman, 1992; Pfaff, 1999; Walker et al., 2000; Weinhold and Reis, 2001; Andersen et al., 2002; Mertens et al., 2002; Margulis, 2004; Chomitz and Thomas, 2003; Pfaff et al., 2007; Diniz et al., 2009; Araujo et al., 2009; Rivero et al., 2009; Barona et al., 2010).”
The Global Supply and Demand for Agricultural Land in 2050: A Perfect Storm in the Making? AAEA Presidential Address (2010, background): “…expansion of farming – particularly in the tropics, where most of the agricultural land conversion has come at the expense of forests, either directly (Gibbs et al.) or indirectly via a cascading of land use requirements with crops moving into pasture and pasture into forest (Barona et al. 2010).”