Land Use and Sediment Yield in an Old Plantation Tract of the Serra Do Mar, Brazil

Abstract

The older part of the coffee belt of south-eastern Brazil provides a classic case of a land use cycle: from primary forest, through crop and pasture, to secondary forest. Coffee {Coffea arabica L.) was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, confined to the coastal lowland around Rio de Janeiro, the Baixada Fluminense, but by 1850 it had crossed the Serra do Mar and had become well established in the foothills flanking the Paraiba river. Sergio Milliet (1939) has mapped the 20-mile wide swath of forest felling and burning through which the coffee frontier advanced for some 200 miles along the Paraiba to within a short distance of the city of Sao Paulo. Within another generation the coffee frontier had moved north-west to Campinas and Ribeirao Preto and with astonishing rapidity the plantation tract along the Paraiba collapsed: the coffee groves {cafesals) were abandoned to weeds and cattle, and the plantation houses {casas grandes) and slave quarters {senzalas) to decay and encroaching forest. This dramatic collapse of a social and economic system has caught the imagination of Brazilian novelists like Monteiro Lobato (1943), and such historians as Taunay (1939-45), Milliet (1939) and Simonsen (1940) have woven a web of theory and counter-theory over the complex causes of failure. Stein (1951, 1953, 1957) has summarized these views and brilliantly documented the rise and fall of the plantation for one Paraiba county, Vassouras. Land use cycles have, however, less spectacular but no less interesting effects on the physical landscape. In a paper titled 'Land use and sediment yield' given at the 1956 Wenner-Gren symposium on Man's role in changing the face of the earth, Dr. L. P. Leopold indicated the linking of land use regimes with sedimentation cycles in the western part of the United States (Leopold, 1956). For the coffee cycle in the Serra do Mar foothills there is enough contemporary evidence to suggest that an investigation of this topic in a tropical area might reveal similar linkage. On crossing the Paraiba river near Entre Rios in June 1867, Richard Burton observed that: