Soybean Technology and the Loss of Natural Vegetation in Brazil and Bolivia
By D. Kaimowitz, Joyotee Smith. 2001
128 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper looks at the impact of the introduction of new soybean technologies on the clearing of natural vegetation (forest and savanna) in southern Brazil, the Brazilian Cerrado, and Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The paper looks at how technological change interacted with other government policies and examines general equilibrium effects on product and labor markets as well as the direct on-farm effects. In southern Brazil new technologies made large-scale mechanized soybean production more profitable. This led to the displacement of many small farmers that moved to the Brazilian Amazon and clearing forests for agriculture. It may have also encouraged deforestation in southern Brasil itself. In the Brazilian Cerrado and Santa Cruz Bolivia the new technologies made it possible to plant soybeans in areas where it had previously not been economically feasible. Large areas of forest and other natural vegetation were cleared as a result.
Subfields: Forestry, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b730c885bb2460b82d4097fa715f07e0c354a0c1
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In Forestry
In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
- H. R. Grau
- Néstor Ignacio Gasparri
- T. Mitchell Aide
- Philip Martin Fearnside
- Oliver T. Coomes
- P. Richards
- Mitchell Aide
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Citations in the corpus
- Agriculture expansion and deforestation in seasonally dry forests of north-west Argentina (2005, background): “Global factors (technological development and international prices) are the main drivers of soybean expansion (Fearnside 2001; Kaimowitz & Smith 2001; Grau et al. 2005).”
- The role of pasture and soybean in deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon (2010, background): “The Brazilian agro-business sector has intensified agricultural land use, increasing large-scale 1748-9326/10/024002+09$30.00 © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd Printed in the UK1 mechanization and improving farm productivity, and become more competitive (Kaimowitz and Smith 2001, Mueller 2003).”
- Exchange Rates, Soybean Supply Response, and Deforestation in South America (2012, background): “A large amount of research has addressed these land cover changes and implicated a wide array of drivers in the process; however, there is little doubt that agricultural expansion has played a key role in forest loss across South America (Defries et al., 2010; Andersen et al., 2002; Kaimowitz and Sm”
- Soybean cultivation as a threat to the environment in Brazil (2001, background): “The soy lobby is credited with obtaining federal subsidies allowing soybeans to expand into areas that were more distant and had poorer soils than would have been justified in the absence of subsidies (Kaimowitz & Smith 2001).”
- Balancing food production and nature conservation in the Neotropical dry forests of northern Argentina (2008, background): “…deforestation in the neotropical dry forest ecosystems (e.g. Cerrado, Caatinga, Chaco) of Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina (Fearnside, 2001; Kaimowitz & Smith, 2001; Steininger et al., 2001; Zak et al., 2004; Grau et al., 2005; Silva et al., 2006), and this is reflected in the increasing…”