Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 29, Issue 3, July 2012, Pages 558-568
Land Use Policy

Persistence of cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon: A spatial analysis of the rationale for beef production

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2011.09.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Fed by demand for beef within Brazil and in global markets, the Brazilian herd grew from 147 million head of cattle in 1990 to ≈200 million in 2007. Eighty-three percent of this expansion occurred in the Amazon and this trend is expected to continue as the industry bounces back from a recent agricultural downturn. Intensification of the cattle industry has been suggested as one way to reduce pressure on forest margins and spare land for soybean or sugarcane production, and is the cornerstone of Brazil's plan for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. To this end, federal credit programs and research and development activities in Brazil are aligning to support intensification goals, but there is no guarantee that this push for intensification will decrease the demand for land at the forest margin and as result curb CO2 emissions from deforestation. In this paper we use a spatially explicit rent model which incorporates the local effects of biophysical characteristics, infrastructure, land prices, and distance to markets and slaughterhouses to calculate 30-year Net Present Values (NPVs) of extensive cattle ranching across the Brazilian Amazon. We use the model to ask where extensive ranching is profitable and how land acquisition affects profitability. We estimate that between 17% and 80% of land in the Amazon would have moderate to high NPVs when ranched extensively if it were settled, i.e. if the rancher does not buy the land but acquires it through land grabbing. In addition, we estimate that between 9% and 13% of land in the Amazon is vulnerable to speculation (i.e. areas with positive NPVs only if land is settled and not purchased), which suggests that land speculation is an important driver of extensive ranching profitability, and may continue to be in the future. These results suggest that pro-intensification policies such as credit provision for improved pasture management and investment in more intensive production systems must be accompanied by implementation and enforcement of policies that alter the incentives to clear forest for pasture, discourage land speculation, and increase accountability for land management practices if intensification of the cattle sector is to deter new deforestation and displace production from low-yield, extensive cattle production systems in frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon.

Highlights

► 9–13% of land in the Amazon is vulnerable to speculation. ► Land speculation contributes to the persistence of extensive ranching in Brazil. ► Enforcing forest law and land tenure reform are crucial for ranching intensification.

Introduction

Brazil sits squarely under the magnifying glass of international scrutiny as both one of the largest CO2 emitters from land use change, and the custodian of the largest tropical forest in the world. Recent efforts on the part of the Brazilian government to curb deforestation on private properties,1 crack down on illegal logging (Serviço Florestal Brasileiro and Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia, 2010), encourage responsible land management on the part of cattle ranchers and soy farmers (Nepstad et al., 2009), and establish vast tracts of native forests as protected areas (Soares-Filho et al., 2010)2 when combined with the recent downturn of agricultural sector helped reduce deforestation in 2010 by 67% from the historical baseline of 19,600 km2 per year between 1996 and 2005. Last year's optimism may have been unfounded; preliminary estimates from March and April of 2011 suggest that deforestation in the state of Mato Grosso from March and April of 2011 more than doubled when compared to the same period last year (BBC News, 2011, INPE, 2011). This may be due to some combination of uncertainty about the fate of the Brazilian Forest Code and the resurgence of agricultural commodity prices (OECD/FAO, 2011). Cattle ranching occupies more land than any other agricultural activity in the Brazilian Amazon (IBGE, census 2007) and will be a key component in designing policies for Brazil to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land-use and land-cover change.

The history of cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon can be traced to the early stages of European settlement. Cattle were bred as draft animals and were slaughtered for meat and leather to feed the growing domestic demand for meat and export demand for leather (Furtado, 1971). In the 1960s, colonization of the Amazon began in earnest. During this period, the government supported extensive ranching by subsidizing credit3 and instating settlement and taxation policies that encouraged the establishment of de facto property rights through occupation and productive use (i.e. deforestation and cultivation) (Almeida and Uhl, 1995, Chaddad and Jank, 2006). Concomitant investments in road-building and infrastructure and the people that followed in their wake cleared large swaths of forest to lay claim to land and ranch cattle (Binswanger, 1991). There was much debate about whether expansion of extensive cattle ranching along the Amazon frontier in the 1970s and 1980s was either ecologically or economically sustainable without government incentives; many expected pasture land to be abandoned unless converted to more input-intensive types of production as soils became degraded (Fearnside, 1979, Fearnside, 1980, Hecht, 1985, Hecht, 1993).

While these debates raged, growing demand for Brazilian beef in domestic and international markets fed growth in the industry during the 1990s. Population growth in urban centers in the Amazon such as Manaus and growth of per-capita consumption in the middle class have caused domestic demand for beef within Brazil to grow (Faminow, 1997a, Faminow, 1997b, Faminow, 1998, Aguiar and da Silva, 2002, Levy-Costa et al., 2005, Steiger, 2006). The signing of the MERCOSUL agreement between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay in 1991 also facilitated export of Brazilian beef within the southern cone (Polaquini et al., 2006). Global market conditions during the same period left Brazil in an ideal position to respond rapidly to the shift in demand for beef when the BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow disease) crisis struck in the United States and Europe together with a drop in supply from Australia and Argentina (Faminow, 1998, Steiger, 2006). Beef exports grew from approximately 5% of production to 20% of production between 1990 and 2007 (Fig. 1), and this surge in demand for Brazilian beef for export meant that many regions demonstrated rapid improvements in sanitation and herd-management practices in order to control foot-and-mouth disease, as being certified free of foot-and-mouth disease (on a regional basis) was a pre-condition for export (Arima et al., 2005, Lima et al., 2005). The southern states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina (which were free of foot-and-mouth disease with vaccination, and later without) met much of the early production for export, though exports from the Amazon states of Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Acre and Tocantins are on the rise in the last decade (Ribeiro et al., 2005; SECEX, 2000–2010).

The Brazilian herd grew from 147 million head of cattle in 1990 to 200 million in 2007 to become the world's largest commercial cattle herd (McAlpine et al., 2009). The majority of this expansion (83%) occurred in the Amazon (Fig. 1). The herd is clearly spreading westward and northward and is growing most rapidly in the states of Rondônia, Mato Grosso and Pará (Simon and Garagorry, 2005, Steiger, 2006). Today, cattle systems in the Amazon run the gamut from more traditionally extensive cria-recria-engorda (full-cycle production from calf to adult steers of slaughter weight) to cow/calf operations or fattening operations, as well as being an important component of both large-scale enterprises and small farm portfolios (Santos et al., 1999, Merry et al., 2004, Caviglia-Harris, 2005, Smeraldi and May, 2008). In spite of the prevalence of cattle ranching in the Amazon, many are puzzled by its spread given its supposed marginal profitability. Studies have suggested that profit and internal rates of return may be low or negative for many small-to-medium scale producers (Mattos and Uhl, 1994, Toniolo and Uhl, 1995, Merry et al., 2004), while larger ranchers may benefit from more significant economies of scale (Somwaru and Valdes, 2004). Barros et al. (2002) completed a comprehensive comparison of the economics of ranching in Pará, Mato Grosso and Rondônia, and found that internal rates of return varied from 9% (Redenção, PA) to 15% (e.g. Alta Floresta, MT and Paragominas, PA), and that profitability varied from 50 to 86 USD per hectare per year. Importantly, these studies do not address how capturing endogenous tenure security by clearing forest to ranch cattle or land speculation may contribute to the profitability of extensive ranching.

There is limited quantitative research that analyzes the contribution of land rent capture or demand for land in Brazil to the profitability of extensive ranching. Walker et al. (2008) and Jones and O’Neill (1994) provide a discussion of this process in the context of classical von Thünen location rent. Using a survey of more than 2000 households, Merry et al. (2008) study the determinants of estimated land values in smallholder households on the Transamazon, and Sills and Caviglia-Harris (2008) find distance to markets and property-level investments to be the most important variables affecting hedonic price estimates of land values in a frontier region of Rondônia. Cattaneo (2008) presents a simple theoretical model whereby the frontier actor captures increased land values of deforested land through the act of clearing land and establishing tenure. The von Thünen interpretation of the Brazilian reality is not altogether inconsistent with Boserup's (1965) description of the process of agricultural growth; agricultural intensification in Brazil along older frontiers and in the southern part of the country is likely driven by increased population pressure and, in turn, the increased demand for land for occupation and cultivation. Land quality and distance to markets are largely viewed as exogenous to the producer in the von Thünen tradition, but Boserup reminds us that agricultural productivity and soil fertility are dynamic and heavily influenced by population pressures and agricultural markets.

These hypotheses are borne out on older frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon where soy production is expanding; during the 2001–2004 period in Mato Grosso, more than 1/3 of the area where soybean plantings expanded was previously in pasture (Morton et al., 2006), and this increased demand for land plays an important role, both directly and indirectly, in driving the expansion of extensive ranching at the deforestation margin along with more intensive cultivation of soy and other crops on older frontiers (Morton et al., 2006, Cattaneo, 2008, Rivero et al., 2009, Barona et al., 2010). Thus, it seems plausible that positive rates of return to ranching in the Amazon may be due to ranchers’ ability to capture increases in land value that accompany land clearing and tenure establishment, infrastructure improvements, and reductions in transportation costs, along with the rising trend in land prices due to increasing demand for agricultural commodities (Mertens et al., 2002, Margulis, 2004, Barreto et al., 2005, Steiger, 2006, Cattaneo, 2008).

Regardless of whether land markets and endogenous land tenure concerns underlie the profitability of extensive ranching, cattle ranching is clearly associated with deforestation. Pasturelands occupy approximately 85% of cleared areas (IBGE, 2007), and herd growth between 2000 and 2005 has a 40% correlation with deforestation (Soares-Filho et al., 2010). Between 60% and 80% of GHG emissions from land use change in Brazil are attributed to cattle ranching (Wassenaar et al., 2007, Garnett, 2009, Zaks et al., 2009, de Gouvello et al., 2010), and when combined with CO2 and methane from livestock production4 and growing of crops for livestock feed (Bustamante et al., 2009, Cederberg et al., 2011), cattle ranching is poised to become the largest source of GHG emissions from LULUCF (land use and land use change and forestry) if deforestation rates continue to slow.

It is this association between extensive ranching, Amazon deforestation, and environmental degradation that was the focus of an influential FAO report (Steinfeld et al., 2006a, Steinfeld et al., 2006b), a major media campaign by Greenpeace (2009), the World Bank Low Carbon Study (de Gouvello et al., 2010) and the Brazilian government response to pressure to develop a plan for the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions (CISMC, 2008, Embassy of Brazil, 2010). Cattle ranching's GHG footprint makes the activity central to the debate about how reductions in GHG emissions from land-use and land-use change are best achieved in Brazil (Cerri et al., 2010, de Gouvello et al., 2010, Galford et al., 2010, Cohn et al., 2011). Hence, Brazil's National Plan for Climate Change (PNMC) (President of the Republic of Brazil, 2008) and Brazil's proposed Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) (Embassy of Brazil, 2010) focus on reducing emissions by constraining the land area occupied by extensive cattle ranching, and intensifying cattle ranching by adopting techniques that make pasture-based systems more productive on existing pasturelands (to a system considered to be semi-intensive or semi-extensive, rather than truly intensive) in order to dedicate more land to higher-yield activities such as crops for food or biofuel production. In doing so, all aforementioned plans argue that Brazil can reconcile forest conservation with crop expansion while reducing greenhouse gas emissions from ranching and yielding land to increased agricultural production as demand increases for food and biofuels produced in Brazil.

Whether intensification of the cattle herd will be accompanied by the reductions in deforestation necessary to make cattle ranching intensification a GHG-saving proposition is still not clear (Cohn et al., 2011). Although the media and international NGOs such as Greenpeace have pressured Brazil to crack down on cattle ranchers’ deforestation by restricting market access for illegal producers, compliance with the terms negotiated as part of the cattle agreement initiated by Greenpeace has lagged5 (Kaimowitz et al., 2004, Nepstad et al., 2006, Nepstad et al., 2009, Aliança da Terra, 2009, Greenpeace, 2009, Junior, 2009, Magalhães, 2009, Reuters, 2009, Vargas, 2009). Other policies and institutions have emerged to combat deforestation and encourage sound land management at the property level, including regional and federal property registries, land tenure reforms, and federal agricultural credit programs to finance improved low-carbon agriculture and land management (see http://www.agricultura.gov.br/desenvolvimento-sustentavel/programa-abc for a description of the low-carbon agriculture program, or ABC).

The idea of mapping and registering properties (including the area in forest and under production) was first a voluntary movement started by groups such as the Xingu Registry of Socio-Environmental Responsibility (Aliança da Terra, 2009), and later initiated at the federal level in the form of the Cadastro Ambiental Rural (CAR, or Rural Environmental Registry) in January of 2010 (President of the Republic of Brazil, 2009). Land tenure reform is also seen as an important tool to curb deforestation rates and improve land management in the region, and the Amazon Fund (http://www.fundoamazonia.gov.br) has allocated more than 1 billion dollars to enforcing deforestation, titling landholders and regularizing property rights. Even so, the relationship between deforestation and land tenure reform is not straightforward from either an economic or a policy perspective. There is much fear that both state-led and so-called “direct action” efforts to grant property rights may be perpetuating a system of perverse incentives for land grabbing and deforestation in anticipation of titling programs; a land tenure policy where claims to land are legalized ex-post will continue to incentivize deforestation unless major changes are made to titling programs (Economist Magazine, 2009, Caldas et al., 2010, Simmons et al., 2010). Furthermore, while deforestation may be a way to gain land tenure, programs that grant tenure or title may also create economic incentives for producers to invest in more intensive property management since there is less risk of expropriation or of losing their landholdings, which could result in either increased or decreased property-level deforestation (Angelsen, 1999, Alston et al., 2000, Araujo et al., 2009, Araujo et al., 2010). One study which evaluates the impacts of titling and land-reform programs on deforestation in Brazil after their implementation shows that the effects are heterogeneous and depend largely upon the previous land use (Pacheco, 2009).

Beyond merely monitoring property use and property-level deforestation, there is a vast body of growing research on more productive management systems that incorporate efficient pasture management, supplemental feeding, confinement, or integrated crop with livestock systems (Rueda et al., 2003, Cattaneo, 2008, de Gouvello et al., 2010, Euclides et al., 2010), and the federally funded EMBRAPA has developed a Best Ranching Practices program that outlines the major investments and technologies that landowners can employ to improve productivity and comply with environmental laws (Euclides Filho et al., 2002). In order to finance these transitions, federal agricultural credit programs have begun to emphasize funding for pasture improvements and other investments which may increase the productivity of ranching (Macedo, 2006, FNO, 2010), as well as to tie receipt of credit to environmental compliance. In practice, however, what we observe is growth in credit provision for rural commercial agriculture; rural agricultural credit for commercial agricultural enterprises grew from 15.6 to 107 billion Reais between 2000 and 2011 (Macedo, 2011) and in 2003, loans to cattle ranchers made up approximately 22% of rural credit (Macedo, 2006). The Northern Constitutional Finance Fund (FNO) established a new line of credit for ranchers in 2010 as part of the “Sustainable Amazon” line (FNO-Amazônia Sustentável) which provides 700 million Reais for capital and inputs to improve the productivity and sustainability of land use, but there appear to be few concrete monitoring provisions to ensure credit is being used for truly sustainable purposes.

To summarize, intensifying cattle production is envisioned as a means for Brazil to attain both reductions in enteric emissions and allow crop expansion without further deforestation (de Gouvello et al., 2010). Credit programs and research on cattle systems, together with the diverse set of policies described above, are aligning to support intensification goals, but there is no guarantee that a push for intensification stimulated by all these policies (which are still in their early stages) will decrease the demand for land at the forest margin, and as a result, curb GHG emissions from land-use change (Nicholson et al., 1995, Carpentier et al., 2000, Lambin et al., 2000, Hardie et al., 2004, Cattaneo, 2008). In fact, the literature suggests that some of the underlying drivers of extensive ranching in frontier regions of the Amazon—such as its role as a low-investment and effective way to lay claim to land or to capture the increases in land value associated with advancing infrastructure and land tenure—are key components not addressed by pro-intensification policies (e.g. Fearnside, 1979, Fearnside, 1980, Hecht, 1985, Hecht, 1993, Jones and O’Neill, 1994, Walker et al., 2008). Therefore, understanding the drivers of extensive ranching is crucial to create an integrated policy landscape which supports intensification of the industry and deters deforestation on frontiers in the Amazon where extensive ranching is the predominant land use.

In order to map and quantify the rationale for extensive ranching in the Brazilian Amazon, we use a spatially explicit rent model which incorporates the local effects of biophysical characteristics, infrastructure, land prices, and distance to markets and slaughterhouses to calculate 30-year Net Present Values (NPVs) of extensive cattle ranching across the Brazilian Amazon. We use the model to ask where ranching is profitable and how land acquisition affects profitability, and then relate our results to recommendations for effective policies that target land titling without incentivizing deforestation, and penalize deforestation where land is not profitable. While previous work has used case studies or surveys to illustrate the relative profitability or lack thereof of extensive ranching in particular regions or used municipal-level statistics on pasture expansion and cattle herd size to analyze time trends, this paper is unique in two ways: firstly, it employs a spatial rent model based upon a detailed profit function that incorporates the local effects of biophysical characteristics, infrastructure, and distance to markets and to slaughterhouses to examine the returns to extensive, pasture-dependent ranching across the Brazilian Amazon, and secondly, it takes a first look at the contribution of the role of cattle ranching as a way to capture land tenure—an important driver not considered by previous studies in a quantitative way—to the profitability of extensive ranching across the Brazilian Amazon.

Section snippets

Model structure

The model is designed to simulate the 30-year Net Present Value (NPV) per hectare of extensive cattle ranching on a prototypical medium-to-large-sized farm (6000 ha of which we assume half are in pasture) for a given 4 km2 unit cell area of the Brazilian Amazon. To arrive at this figure, we developed a spatially and temporally explicit profit function that reflects the fixed and variable costs associated with extensive cattle ranching in the region (Fig. 2). For a cell in year i with location j,

Land purchase scenario

In this scenario, we assume that the rancher acquires land at current prices (FNP, 2007), and must borrow to do so. As a result, this scenario exhibits the lowest Net Present Value estimates, which is as expected. 30-year average Net Present Value estimates range from $-172 to $39 USD per hectare on forested land and from $-156 to $58 USD per hectare on deforested land for this scenario. The distribution of deforested and forested area according to NPV can be seen in panels (A) and (B) of Fig. 3

Discussion and conclusions

The degree to which extensive ranching is profitable and where can depend a great deal upon the set of assumptions with respect to the process of land acquisition, as well as expectations about price trajectories. Our results show that land grabbing at the frontier with the expectation that infrastructure, markets, and more productive agricultural commodities will advance with time contributes to the persistence of extensive ranching in regions where it is only marginally profitable to raise

Role of the funding source

This work was supported by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Brazilian Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Linden Trust for Conservation, Joseph H. Gleberman, Roger and Victoria Sant, Climate and Land Use Alliance, and the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Letícia Hissa for her (very patient) help in preparing several figures for this paper and Jayne Guimarães for her help in the field.

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