Abstract
Agricultural landscapes of the southern Brazilian Amazon are the result of 80 years of governmental policies to install a powerful agricultural sector. Yet, this rapid expansion raised important environmental considerations especially with regard to deforestation. The agricultural frontier is thus now facing a huge challenge: to combine socioeconomic development with environmental conservation in the context of frontier expansion. Based on a conceptual model of the agricultural frontier, we review historical changes in environmental and development policies in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso and emphasize their ambivalent trend to both encourage and control the progress of the frontier. We then extend this model with an integration stage where environmental governance and economic development evolve from competing to complementary concepts. At this stage, the efforts to slow down deforestation are accompanied with programs to promote new agricultural practices and support industrialization. Finally, we put into perspective this recent evolution with regard to the underlying reasons for changing the agricultural model, thus considering the agricultural frontier to be at a tipping point where first positive results need to be confirmed in spite of an unstable economic and political situation.
Highlights
Brazil has long been blamed for the severe damage caused by the rapid progress of its agricultural frontier to natural resources and especially to Amazon rainforests and savannahs (Fearnside 2001; Laurance et al 2001; Morton et al 2006)
Intensive stage crop expansion and intensification processes are still ongoing preoccupations in Mato Grosso, it is worth noting that recent decades have been characterized by urbanization and the creation of new protected areas, which according to the theory of DeFries et al (2004), are indicators of the final intensive stage
After years of debate (Roriz and Fearnside 2015), a new Forest Code has been approved, which reduces the requirements for protecting natural vegetation on private farm land (Roriz and Fearnside 2015; Soares-Filho et al 2014): (i) Permanently Protected Areas (PPAs) are included in the computation of the Legal Reserve Areas (LRAs) and (ii) local governments can reduce the proportion of the LRAs from 80% to 50% in states or municipalities where Conservation Units or Indigenous Lands cover more than 65% of the total area
Summary
Brazil has long been blamed for the severe damage caused by the rapid progress of its agricultural frontier to natural resources and especially to Amazon rainforests and savannahs (Fearnside 2001; Laurance et al 2001; Morton et al 2006).
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