Closing the Yield Gap in Livestock Production in Brazil: New Results and Emissions Insights

Abstract

We analyze the impacts of partially closing the livestock yield gap in Brazil, with a focus on a reduction in deforestation and emissions, using a computable general equilibrium model of Brazil, the TERM-BR model, tailored for land use and emissions analyses. We use satellite imagery information generated by LAPIG (Images Processing and Geoprocessing Laboratory, University of Goias, Brasil) for the year 2014, at municipal level (5570 observations) to calculate the yield gap, using the Tukey method to identify measurement errors in the data. In our calculation, we selected the 10% most productive municipalities in Brazil in livestock production, to calculate the average productivity of this quantile, as an estimate of the attainable regional productivity. The yield gap is expressed as the difference between the average of the 10% quantile and the general average in each region. We further weigh this measure by the share of land with high and very high suitability for pastures, by state. In GHG accounting, we introduce the accounting of carbon storage in soils. With that, we take into account three emissions effects in livestock intensification: a natural forest sparing effect, an emissions in the herd effect, and the carbon storage in soils effect. We undertake GHG emissions calculations in livestock in two alternative ways: in the first way fixed coefficients in relation to livestock activity are used; and in the second alternative way, carbon storage in soils is included. Our results show that the increase in emissions associated with the growing herd size would outweigh the emissions reduction generated by the forest sparing effect, if carbon storage in soils is not taken into account. We conclude that this third effect of carbon storage in soils is very important in avoiding the wrong inference when analyzing climate policies involving livestock intensification.