Abstract
Agricultural census data and fieldwork observations are used to analyze changes in land cover/use intensity across Rondônia and Mato Grosso states along the agricultural frontier in the Brazilian Amazon. Results show that the development of land use is strongly related to land distribution structure. While large farms have increased their share of annual and perennial crops, small and medium size farms have strongly contributed to the development of beef and milk market chains in both Rondônia and Mato Grosso. Land use intensification has occurred in the form of increased use of machinery, labor in agriculture and stocking rates of cattle herds. Regional and national demands have improved infrastructure and productivity. The data presented show that the distinct pathways of land use development are related to accessibility to markets and processing industry as well as to the agricultural colonization history of the region. The data analyzed do not provide any indication of frontier stagnation, i.e., the slowdown of agricultural expansion, in the Brazilian Amazon. Instead of frontier stagnation, the data analyzed indicate that intensification processes in consolidated areas as well as recent agricultural expansion into forest areas are able to explain the cycle of expansion and retraction of the agricultural frontier into the Amazon region. The evolution of land use is useful for scenario analysis of both land cover change and land use intensification and provides insights into the role of market development and policies on land use.
Highlights
Conversions of forest to cropland and cattle ranching are major causes of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, which is a core environmental concern [1,2,3,4,5]
Results from the TerraClass project based on remote sensing data [82,83] confirm the trends in mechanized agriculture in Mato Grosso where temporal changes identified by land use classification using Landsat/TM imagery show that annual crops increased by 4.9% between 2006 and 2008
Our analysis has shown that intensification processes in consolidated areas of agricultural production are a result of technological improvement, market accessibility and unequal land distribution, which the same factors are supposed to explain the cycle of expansion and retraction of the Brazilian frontier into the Amazon
Summary
Conversions of forest to cropland and cattle ranching are major causes of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, which is a core environmental concern [1,2,3,4,5]. Studies based on remote sensing data estimate that the cleared area in moist closed forests alone has increased from 100 thousand km in the 1970s to more than 730 thousands km in 2008 [6,7,8] This rapid deforestation was triggered by federal policies established in the 1970s and 1980s such as the construction of road networks and government-assisted settlements/colonization programs. Discontinuities in crop production, low productivity rates and the relatively high occurrence of land abandonment observed in the region may corroborate the idea of the limited viability of agriculture in the Amazon [13]. These ideas reinforce the premise of the stagnation, i.e., the significant slowdown of the agricultural frontier. Available literature suggests that a likely stagnation of the agricultural frontier in the Brazilian Amazon would be characterized by a specific combination of market development, accessibility to infrastructure and unequal land distribution that limit further evolution of land use systems [10,11,12,15,16]
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