- Home to almost half of Brazil’s agriculture, the country’s leaders are looking toward the Cerrado to accelerate economic development.
- The Cerrado is also home to indigenous communities and traditional societies, such as the quilombolas, descendants of escaped African slaves.
- The report argues for a more inclusive process that preserves traditional farming practices, intensifies existing large-scale agriculture and protects the Cerrado’s water, habitat and biodiversity.
The expanse of tropical savanna in Brazil known as the Cerrado faces an uncertain future, as a decades-old trajectory toward more agriculture continues. But a recent report holds that with the right strategy, the region’s natural resources can be protected alongside the region’s most important economic activity.
Hanging in the shadow of its more famous neighbor, the Amazon, the Cerrado’s wooded grasslands support fewer plant and animal species, but it’s got a healthy surfeit of water – one reason it contains 44 percent of Brazil’s agriculture, including most of the country’s cotton and soybeans, as well as 40 percent of its beef, according to the report published by the NGO Climate and Land Use Alliance. That push since the 1970s has led to the deforestation of half the Cerrado.
However, the grasslands do have important charms of their own, said Arnaldo Carneiro of the agribusiness analytics firm AGRIONE. “The Cerrado is a unique environment in the South American context for its ‘water tank’ effect (as home to large water reservoirs), biodiversity and social diversity,” he writes in a review of the report. He was not involved in the research.
Rather than see the remainder of the area converted to farm and pastureland, the report’s authors, from the firm California Environmental Associates, argue for its preservation, especially its most pristine pieces. But the Ministry of Agriculture seems to have different plans.
“Today, Matopiba – the northern portion of the Cerrado where the majority of the biome’s intact native habitat is found – is one of the primary agricultural frontiers in Brazil,” the authors write. They express concern for the rapid surge in food production that the country’s leaders hope to encourage with the Agricultural Development Plan Matopiba.
The plan has been “heavily criticized by civil society organizations for being formulated with limited consultation and transparency and for not including social and environmental representation on its governing body,” they write.
As in many remote areas of the world, land ownership in the Cerrado doesn’t always fall within neatly delineated legal lines, even though communities may have ties to a specific piece of land that stretch back generations. The mosaic model of rotational farming that they practice has typically allowed the Cerrado biome to support life and its important contributions to places like the Amazon.
The report’s authors argue for a change in course from the government’s development plans toward one that includes the perspectives of local communities. They advocate investment in payment-for-ecosystem-services strategies that aim to monetize the Cerrado’s contributions to hydropower, municipal water supplies and farming. And they point out that the intensification of farming and ranching could spare the loss of more of the region’s land to food production.
“According to a recent study,” they write, “Brazil could meet demands for increased crop acreage through 2040 without any further conversion of native habitat through intensification of pastureland and shifting crop cultivation onto the freed-up land.”
“This is an important strategy for the Cerrado, which has about 40 percent (almost 20 Mha) of the country’s potential for pasture restoration,” they add.
But the report’s conclusions and recommendations have drawn some concern that they may not be realistic.
“This type of development can be understood as the establishment of a more balanced relationship between economic development, environmental preservation and social inclusion,” writes Franklin Plessmann de Carvalho, an agroecologist at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, in a review of the paper. But, he adds, “I argue that it is impossible to build consensus between such diverging sets of interests.”
He also said that two of the prescribed remedies, stronger enforcement of Brazil’s forest protection law known as the Forest Code and incentivizing conservation with credits such as payments for ecosystem services, don’t stand a great chance of protecting biodiversity.
“It is a set of actions already being implemented that, in a best case scenario, do very little to slow down environmental degradation,” he writes. “Instead of striving to conciliate agribusiness interests, actions must be supported to strengthen an economy based on the preservation of sociobiodiversity.”
What could benefit the Cerrado, Carvalho writes, is a strategy that puts power in the hands of the people who live there, and he looks to the example of the Amazon.
“Since PRODES (Amazon deforestation monitoring program) was launched in 2004, organizations gained a new capacity of social control over the territory,” said Carvalho, himself a researcher at the New Social Cartography of the Amazon Project.
“The reduced deforestation observed as of 2004 has something to do with this increased capacity for analysis, social control and exercising greater influence in public policies.”
- Dickie, A., Magno, I., Giampietro, J., Dolginow, A. (2016). “Challenges and Opportunities for Conservation, Agricultural Production, and Social Inclusion in the Cerrado Biome.” CEA Consulting.
- Strassburg, B. B. N., et al. (2014). “When Enough Should Be Enough: Improving the Use of Current Agricultural Lands Could Meet Production Demands and Spare Natural Habitats in Brazil.” Global Environmental Change.