I.) INTRODUCTION: THE RATIONALE FOR
INTENSIFICATION
Cattle
pasture is the predominant land use in deforested areas in Brazilian Amazonia
(Fearnside, 1990, 1996). Any policy
changes that affect the motivations to expand this land use would therefore
have a key role in shaping the future course of deforestation. Intensification of pasture management,
especially through application of phosphate fertilizers, has been subsidized by
the Brazilian government as a means of reducing deforestation. The assumptions underlying this strategy
require careful examination.
The
logic of subsidizing intensification is summarized by Serrão and Homma (1993:
319-320) of the Brazilian Enterprise for Agriculture and Cattle Ranching
Research (EMBRAPA):
"With technological
intensification and consequent improvement in the sustainability of
forest-replacing pastures, ...productivity
from cattle raising operations in the Amazon can be doubled or
tripled. Therefore, from a technical
point of view, no more than 50 percent of the area already used for cattle
raising is actually necessary to meet the regional demand for beef.... If this is correct, ...a considerable amount
of already degraded pastureland can be reclaimed or regenerated toward forest
formation and biomass accumulation".
Pasture
intensification is done through applications of fertilizers and herbicides,
replanting with better grass varieties, genetic improvement of cattle herds and
better regulation of stocking densities and rotation schedules. Intensification is promoted both in ranches
cut from Amazon forest and those in the Pantanal wetlands of Mato Grosso and
Mato Grosso do Sul (Fig. 1). In the case
of the Pantanal, EMBRAPA has recommended that properties plant 10% of their
area in improved pasture, even though some forest on high non-flooded ground
within each property must be sacrificed to do this. This clearing is in "encordilleiras,"
or unflooded areas on rises within the Pantanal; these topographic features
occupy a greater proportion of the landscape in the area nearest the
"planalto" (upland areas outside of the Pantanal) on the eastern edge
of the region.
[Figure
1 here]
Proposals
to create new subsidies or to "redirect" old ones (c.f. Serrão and
Toledo, 1990: 210) will always find enthusiastic support among
beneficiaries. Beneficiaries represent
an interest group that can be expected to work to perpetuate and expand any
subsidy program, regardless of its agronomic, social or environmental
results. Amazonian ranchers were
benefitted by generous government subsidies in the form of fiscal incentives
and subsidized credit in the 1970s and 1980s (Yokomizo, 1989). Contrary to popular belief, many of these
ranchers still receive fiscal incentives because the 25 June 1991 decree (No.
153) on incentives only suspended granting new incentives, rather than
revoking old (already approved) ones.
Ranchers represent a political force with influence far beyond their
small numbers. Great care must therefore
be taken in initiating new subsidies.
II.) REASONS TO DOUBT THE OFFICIAL SCENARIO
A.) THE
FULL-STOMACH HYPOTHESIS
A variety
of indications suggest a lack of reality to the imagined scenario whereby
ranchers who profit from successful intensification will refrain from further
clearing. First, this runs contrary to
what is known of human economic behavior generally. When people make money from a given activity,
the virtually universal response is to expand that activity rather than to
limit it. If pasture intensification
were really an economic success, then not only would individual ranchers
increase the proportion of their land devoted to the system, but additional
investors would be attracted to the region to take advantage of the
opportunity.
As
Kaimowitz (1996: 56) has observed in the context of Central America, "A
plausible argument can even be made that improved livestock technology
applicable to areas with poor soils in the humid tropics is likely to increase
deforestation, as it would make cattle raising in these areas more
profitable." In the Amazonian
context, likely effects would include further stimulation of land sales and
expulsion of small farmers to more distant deforestation frontiers. This is because Amazonian ranchers buy out
small farmers with offers of attractive sums because ranchers have a higher
shadow price for the land (Schneider, 1994).
This difference in shadow price would increase even more if improved
technologies were available to which ranchers would be likely to have better
access (Kaimowitz, 1996: 56). When small
farmers are bought out, deforestation rates on the purchased properties
approximately double (Fearnside, 1984).
An
alternative response to income gained from intensification is to invest the
profits in other promising activities (such as expanding extensive
ranching)--but these activities usually involve cutting down more forest. An example is investment of income from
successful cacao harvests in Rondônia in expanding extensive cattle pastures,
rather than putting the money back into the environmentally more desirable
perennial crop (see Fearnside, 1987a).
Another is the use of profits from timber to keep the ranching industry
going in Paragominas, Pará (Mattos and Uhl, 1994).
The
argument that increasing the productivity of pastures will "limit future
use of forest for new pasture" has recently been made by Faminow (1998:
232). The assumption is that, with
higher productivity, either ranchers would be satisfied with their profits or
the market for beef will be saturated such that further clearing is
unprofitable. I have often questioned
the notion that Amazonian small farmers would stop clearing if only their
stomachs could be filled by improved yields (e.g., Fearnside, 1987a,
1998a). The idea of ranchers limiting
their expansion because they are satisfied with their level of material
existence would be even more far-fetched.
Markets, on the other hand, can eventually become saturated, but pasture
is likely to be able to expand tremendously, and at great environmental cost,
before market forces would restrain this process. The beef demand in Amazonia that was assumed by
Serrão and Homma (1993: 319-320) to set the upper limit on the extent of
Amazonian ranching is hardly the ceiling imagined. Beef can be consumed in the rest of Brazil,
and beyond, despite restrictions on export of frozen beef to many countries due
to aphthosis (hoof-and-mouth disease) in South America. More importantly, ranchers base their
deforestation decisions on many motives other than beef sale.
B.)
PASTURE IS NOT FOR BEEF ALONE
The
logic of intensification as a strategy for slowing deforestation rests on the
assumption that the primary motive for expanding pasture is to produce
beef. Various indications point to other
motives as critical in the behavior of Amazonian ranchers. Perhaps the clearest indication is the case
of the Agriculture and Ranching district of the Manaus Free Trade Zone
(SUFRAMA). In the state of Amazonas,
which is dominated by the state capital at Manaus (1999 population
approximately 1.6 million), only 25% of beef consumed is produced in the state
(Faminow, 1998: 132). The SUFRAMA
agriculture and ranching district, located on the outskirts of Manaus and
protected from competition by vast distances to competing producer areas, is
notorious for having become a sea of secondary forest when government subsidies
dried up beginning in 1984. If beef
production were so profitable, why haven't these ranches remained active over
the period since 1984, during which time the population of Manaus has
approximately doubled, along with its attendant beef demand? The case of Manaus fits a picture that
includes deforestation motives other than the beef market: motivation for
maintaining the SUFRAMA ranches would have depended almost solely on beef
profits because the timber value of these forests is relatively low, because
pasture is not needed to maintain possession of the land since the ranches are
part of a government-organized scheme with proper surveying and documentation
(unlike the legal free-for-all of southern Pará), and because the threat of
invasion by landless migrants has (until very recently) been quite remote.
Land
speculation and government financial incentives add to the profitability of
felling for pasture, even in the face of negligible production of beef
(Browder, 1988; Fearnside, 1980, 1987b; Hecht, 1993; Hecht et al.,
1988). Faminow (1998) has presented a
contrary view (for a rebuttal, see Fearnside, 1999a). Faminow (1998: 125 and 131) believes instead
that demand for beef and milk in Amazonian cities is the key factor motivating
pasture conversion. The case of Manaus
belies the generality of such an interpretation.
Perhaps
the clearest sign that land speculation has been a significant force in
deforestation is the pattern of deforestation since Brazil's July 1994 Plano
Real economic package was instituted, greatly reducing the rate of
inflation. LANDSAT imagery indicate
first a tremendous initial jump in the deforestation rate in 1995 to 29 X 103
km2/yr, versus 15 X 103 km2/yr in 1994
(Brazil, INPE, 1998); the jump is best explained as the result of a much larger
volume of money becoming available for investment following institution of the
Plano Real. The 1995 peak was followed
by a substantial decline, to 14 X 103 km2/yr in 1996 and
13 X 103 km2/yr in 1997; according to a preliminary
estimate, the decline was followed by an increase to 17 X 103 km2/yr
in 1998 (Brazil, INPE, 1999). The
1995-1997 decline in deforestation rates accompanied a drop in land prices by
over 50% over the same period--a price decrease that is best explained as the
result of the greatly reduced rate of inflation having eliminated the role of
land as an inflation hedge. The
association of falling land prices with reduced deforestation rates suggests
that a significant part of the deforestation that was taking place in prior
years was motivated by speculation.
It is
important to remember that speculation takes place on the basis of whole
properties rather than just the portion of each one that has been converted to
pasture. The forested portions of the
properties, including the timber stocks they contain, represent a significant
value. The pasture provides an effective
guarantee of continued possession of the entire property, therefore providing
an important motivation in addition to beef production. If a property were offered for sale without a
portion of it being under pasture, even if degraded, the remaining forest would
have a lower sale value because of the need for a prospective buyer to either
make heavy expenditures in clearing part of the forest or risk losing
possession of the property.
Money
laundering offers another potential source of motivation for investment in
expanding Amazonian cattle pasture.
"Dirty" money gained through drugs, corruption and many other
illegal sources can be converted into "clean" money by investing in
Amazonian business ventures, such as gold mining dredges and cattle ranches,
even if they are unprofitable based on the face value of return on
investment. The logic is illustrated by
the case of former Federal Deputy (congressperson) João Alves, who gained
notoriety in Brazil's 1993 federal budget scandal (ISTOÉ, 29 December
1993). João Alves won approximately 55
times in Brazil's national lottery because he had bought many thousands of
tickets in order to convert an estimated US$ 50 million in illegally gained
cash into legally recognized winnings.
The small percentage of money invested in lottery tickets that will, on
average, return to a bettor as winnings would make investment in financially
unpromising Amazonian ranching schemes seem like excellent deals.
C.)
CATTLE DENSITY, PASTURE PRODUCTIVITY AND CLEARING
In an
analysis of 191 counties (municípios) in Brazilian Amazonia, Reis and
Margulis (1991: 358) found a strong positive relationship between cattle
density per square kilometer and rate of deforestation. However, this econometric analysis indicated
annual cropping as having a greater elasticity than the size of the cattle
herd, both when the analysis was done using areas of annual crops (Reis and Margulis,
1991) and using their production in tons (Reis and Margulis, 1994: 186). Cline (1991) believes that co-linearity among
the various variables is the likely explanation for Reis and Margulis (1991)
having found a relatively low contribution from the cattle herd (explaining
only 10% of the deforestation in simulations for 1980-1985).
One
would expect a close association between cattle and deforestation because of
the known association between property size and deforestation, and the obvious
fact that large ranches tend to plant pasture more than small farmers (although
small farmers also plant pasture).
Evidence that most clearing is done by medium and large ranches includes
regressions of the deforestation rate on the area of private land in different
property sizes in the Amazonian states, adjusted for the differences in the
sizes of the states. Such regressions
explain 74% of the variance in deforestation rates for 1990 and 1991, and
indicate small farmers as accounting for only 30.5% of the total (Fearnside,
1993). Another is interviews conducted
by Nepstad et al. (1999) on 202 properties in the "arc of
deforestation" from Paragominas to Rio Branco, indicating only 25% of the
clearing in properties of 100 ha or less.
An indirect indication is provided by the sizes of clearings measured on
LANDSAT imagery for 1995-1997 (Brazil, INPE, 1998, 1999). These measurements indicate the percentage of
clearings <15 ha in area was 21% in 1995, 18% in 1996 and 10% in 1997. The 15-ha cutoff is well above the
approximately 3 ha/year that small farmer families can clear using family
labor. These values offer only an
indirect indication of the role of small farmers because the values omit small
clearings--the limit of detection is 6.25 ha at the 1:250,000 scale used for
image interpretation. Note that the
areas refer to the size of clearings, not to the size of the properties in
which they are located.
In a
study of farming in Rondônia, Jones et al. (1995) found that
"productivity of land in cattle appears to be essentially unaffected by clearance
rates." One can deduce from this
that the opposite also applies, i.e., that changes in cattle
productivity do not affect farmers' land-clearing behavior in either
direction. Dale et al. (1993:
1002) found that good soils have the largest number of beef cattle in Ouro
Preto do Oeste, Rondônia, but Jones et al. (1995) have found thatsoil
quality is unrelated to deforestation rate at the site.
III.) FUTURE PROSPECTS OF INTENSIFICATION
A.)
ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS
One
sign that bodes poorly for intensification is the minimal extent of
unsubsidized pasture using higher input systems. Hecht (1992) points out the lack of response
to technology improvement in the Paragominas area. A dramatic demonstration of this occurred in
1995, when the Plano Real economic package (inaugurated in July 1994) suddenly
made much larger amounts of money available for investment. Rather than a boom in adoption of improved
pasture management, the response of Amazonian ranchers was a tremendous
increase in deforestation rates. The
annual deforestation rate more than doubled from 14 X 103 km2/yr
in 1994 to 29 X 103 km2/yr in 1995 (Brazil, INPE, 1998).
In the
Altamira area of Pará, Castellanet et al. (1994) found that the
predictions of Boserup (1965) regarding population density and intensification
were borne out in the case of pasture management. In other words, landowners in Altamira are not
intensifying their pastures. Boserup
(1965) provides the classic presentation of the relationship of population
density changes to land-use intensities, where producers in sparsely populated
regions such as Amazonia tend to adopt extensive rather than intensive
technologies, only shifting to more intensive methods when the density of
settlement increases.
B.)
PHOSPHATE LIMITS
EMBRAPA
has recognized that added phosphorus is necessary to maintain pasture
productivity, and in 1977 changed its previous position that pasture improves
soil, recommending instead that productivity be maintained by applying 200-300
kg/ha of phosphate fertilizer (50% simple superphosphate, 50% hyperphosphate)
(Serrão and Falesi, 1977: 55), to supply 50 kg/ha of P2O5
(Serrão et al., 1978: 28). This
was subsequently modified to 25-50 kg/ha P2O5 (Serrão et
al., 1979: 220), but more recent recommendations have been for the original
50 kg/ha (Correa and Reichardt, 1995).
Low
levels of available phosphorus in the soil have been found to limit growth of
pasture grasses in Paragominas (Serrão et al., 1978, 1979). Problems limiting reliance on phosphate fertilizers
are the cost of supplying phosphate and the absolute limits to minable stocks
of this mineral. A report on Brazil's phosphate deposits published by the
Ministry of Mines and Energy indicates that only one small deposit exists in
Amazonia (actually two close together: Serra de Pirocaua and Ilha Trauira),
located on the Atlantic coast near the border of Pará and Maranhão (de Lima,
1976, see also Fenster and León, 1978).
In addition to the deposit's small size, it has the disadvantage of
being made up of aluminum compounds that render its agricultural use
suboptimal, but not impossible if new technologies were developed for
fertilizer manufacture (dos Santos, 1981: 178).
An additional deposit has been found on the Maecuru River, near Monte
Alegre, Pará (Beisiegel and de Souza, 1986), but estimation of its size is
still incomplete. Almost all of Brazil's
phosphates are in Minas Gerais, a site very distant from most of Amazonia.
Brazil
as a whole is not blessed with a particularly large stock of phosphates‑‑the
United States, for example, has deposits about 20 times larger (de Lima, 1976:
26). Brazil's reserves total only 1.6%
of the global total (de Lima, 1976: 26). Continuation of post‑World War
II trends in phosphate use would exhaust the world's stocks by the middle of
the twenty-first century (United States, CEQ and Department of State,
1980). Although simple extrapolation of
these trends is questionable because of limits to continued human population
increase at past rates, the conversion of a substantial portion of Amazonia to
fertilized pasture would greatly hasten the day when phosphate stocks are
exhausted in Brazil and the world. Brazil would be wise to ponder carefully
whether its remaining stocks of this limited resource should be allocated to
Amazonian pastures (Fearnside, 1997).
A rough
calculation can be made of the adequacy of Brazilian phosphate reserves to
sustain pastures in Amazonia. Brazilian reserves of phosphate rock total 780.6
X 106 t, with an average P2O5 content of 12%
(de Lima, 1976: 24), not counting the Maecuru deposit still being assessed.
Discounting loss of 8% of P2O5 in transforming rock to
phosphate fertilizer (de Lima, 1976: 10), this represents 86.2 X 106
t of P2O5. The five
largest companies have reserves totalling 67.1 X 106 t of P2O5
(after corrections for losses), which current extraction rates would exhaust in
only 30 years in a projection that includes no expectation of phosphate use for
pasture fertilization (de Albuquerque, 1996: 56 and 99). The 54.7 X 106 ha of forest
cleared by 1998 in the Legal Amazon (Brazil, INPE, 1998) would consume 1.1 X 106
t of P2O5 annually if maintained in pasture. This assumes
that pastures are fertilized once every 2.5 years (Serrão et al., 1979:
220), at the 50 kg/ha dose of P2O5 per fertilization,
considering a minimum critical level of 5 ppm P2O5 in the
soil rather than the traditional critical level of 10 ppm, which would require
annual doses of fertilizer to maintain. If the entire 400 X 106 ha
of originally forested area in the Legal Amazon were fertilized at the rate
recommended for pasture, it would require 8.0 X 106 t of P2O5
annually. If all of Brazil's phosphate
reserves were devoted to this purpose, they would last 79 years maintaining the
currently deforested area (an area the size of France) under pasture, and only
11 years if the remainder of the originally forested area were also converted
to pasture (Table 1). However, Brazil's
fertilizer deposits are already almost totally committed to maintaining
agricultural production outside the Legal Amazon (Fearnside, 1998b).
[Table
1 here]
Nothing
obliges Brazil to rely solely on domestic phosphate supplies, although global
supplies are also finite. For high
priority uses, phosphates are already imported to Amazonia from abroad. The Jari project now uses phosphates from
North Carolina, U.S.A. In the case of
the soybean and irrigated rice project in Humaitá that became a top political
priority in the state of Amazonas prior to the 1998 gubernatorial elections,
NPK fertilizer was imported from Israel for distribution to the farmers.
C.)
GLOBAL WARMING MITIGATION
Could
intensification of pasture management be subsidized with the objective of
sequestering carbon in the soil as a global warming mitigation measure? This would give subsidization programs access
to much greater volumes of money; for example, the United States is expecting
to spend US$ 8 billion annually on "flexibility mechanisms" such as
the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in order to meet its commitments under
the Kyoto Protocol (see Fearnside, 1998b).
Intensification of Amazonian pasture management has been proposed for
its carbon benefits in surface soils (Batjes and Sombroek, 1997), but the
effectiveness of such measures depends greatly on assumptions regarding
previous land use and subsequent management (Fearnside and Barbosa, 1998). Most importantly, the use of funds intended
to avert global warming would be much better spent on measures to slow the rate
of deforestation. This would not only be
the most cost-effective use of funds for mitigating climate change, but would
also bring many more additional benefits in maintaining forests intact
(Fearnside, 1995).
IV.) UNDERSTANDING DEFORESTATION
Understanding
the causes of Amazonian deforestation is still in an embryonic state. This is in part a function of the lack of
concerted research efforts on the causes of deforestation on a scale
commensurate with the importance of the problem. I have always been impressed by the disparity
between modeling efforts in the field of climate change and those for tropical
deforestation. The half-dozen major
global circulation models (GCMs) used for estimates of climatic changes each
consists of approximately 300,000 lines of computer code, runs on a "super
computer," and has a full-time team of programmers maintained over several
decades to continually test and improve the model. By contrast, efforts to model tropical
deforestation are usually the efforts of individuals or small groups working
with minimal resources. Despite these
limitations, progress continues to be made on modeling deforestation (see
reviews by Kaimowitz and Angelsen, 1998 and Lambin, 1994). Perhaps if understanding the dynamics of
deforestation were given a priority on a par with that accorded climate change,
we would be closer to having predictive models.
We would need functional (i.e., causal) models that are spatially
explicit and include location-specific representation of the behavior of
different social groups. Only when such
models provide adequately reliable scenarios under a range of alternative
policy regimes would it be possible to tap the major financial resources that
could become available should, for example, policy changes to slow
deforestation be accepted as a means of avoiding greenhouse gas emissions under
the terms of the Kyoto Protocol (i.e., with "verifiability" of
"additionality").
A
danger exists that controversy among researchers over the causes of
deforestation will be seized upon as an excuse to postpone doing anything about
the problem. Ample precedents exist,
such as the tobacco industry lobby delaying for decades action by any
government to discourage smoking on the strength of an alleged
"controversy" over whether smoking causes cancer, or similar
successes by fossil fuel lobbies to delay and weaken action on global
warming. In the case of Amazonian
deforestation, we already know enough to identify some of the critical drivers
that should be the targets of immediate action by government. These include policies governing land-tenure
establishment, levying and collecting taxes to remove the profits from land
speculation, strengthening of environmental impact assessment requirements for
proposed development projects, and limiting the construction of highways
(Fearnside, 1989). Subsidizing pasture
intensification is not recommended as a strategy to slow deforestation.
V.) CONCLUSIONS
Subsidizing
the intensification of pasture management in Brazilian Amazonia is not likely
to result in the reductions in deforestation rates foreseen by proponents. In addition, limits on financial resources
and on physical inputs such as phosphates are unlikely to permit maintenance of
vast areas of pasture under these systems.
The search for effective measures to discourage deforestation should
focus on the suite of motivations that lead ranchers to invest in forest
clearing, including factors unrelated to producing beef. Factors such as land speculation and land
tenure security can override expected effects of subsidizing pasture
intensification.
VI.) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The
National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq AI
350230/97-98) and the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA PPI
5-3150) provided financial support.
Portions of this discussion have been updated from Fearnside (1998b,
1999a, nd). I thank S.V. Wilson and
P.M.L.A. Graça for comments.
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FIGURE LEGEND
Figure 1 -- Brazilian
Amazonia and the Pantanal wetlands with locations mentioned in the text.
|
Table 1: |
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Phosphate
requirements for maintaining pasture |
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in Brazilian
Amazonia |
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PHOSPHATE
DEPOSITS |
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|
Brazilian
phosphate deposits (106 t rock) |
780.7 |
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Deposits,
corrected for 8% loss |
718.2 |
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|
|
P2O5 at 12% (106 t P2O5) |
86.2 |
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FERTILIZER
DOSAGES |
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Frequency of
fertilization (years) |
2.5 |
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||||
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|
Fertilizer dose/fertilization (t P2O5/ha) |
0.05 |
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||||
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|
Fertilizer
dose/year (t/ha P2O5) |
0.02 |
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REQUIREMENT
FOR AREA ALREADY CLEARED |
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|
|
Area of
forest cleared by 1998 (106 ha) |
54.7 |
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Fertilizer
consumption/yr in area cleared by 1998 (106 t P2O5) |
1.1 |
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||||
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Time that
stock would last (years) |
79 |
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REQUIREMENT IF
WHOLE FOREST IS CLEARED |
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Area of
original forest in Legal Amazon (106 ha) |
400 |
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Fertilizer
consumption/yr if whole forest cleared (106 t P2O5) |
8.0 |
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Time that
stock would last (years) |
11 |
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Fig. 1
