Soy Expansion and Socioeconomic Development in Municipalities of Brazil

Abstract

Soy occupies the largest area of agricultural land in Brazil, spreading from southern states to the Amazon region. Soy is also the most important agricultural commodity among Brazilian exports affecting food security and land use nationally and internationally. Here we pose the question of whether soy expansion affects only economic growth or whether it also boosts socioeconomic development, fostering education and health improvements in Brazilian municipalities where it is planted. To achieve this objective, we divided more than 5000 municipalities into two groups: those with >300 ha of soy (soy municipalities) and those with <300 ha of soy (non-soy municipalities). We compared the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Gini coefficient for income for these two groups of municipalities in 1991, 2000, and 2010. We made such comparison at the municipality level for the whole country, but we also grouped the municipalities by major geographical regions and states. We found that the HDI was higher in soy municipalities, especially in the agricultural frontier. That effect was not so clear in more consolidated agricultural regions of the country. Soy municipalities also had a higher Gini coefficient for income than non-soy municipalities. We concluded that soy could be considered a precursor of socioeconomic development under certain conditions; however, it also tends to be associated with an increase in income inequality, especially in the agricultural frontier.

Commodity-Centric Landscape Governance as a Double-Edged Sword: The Case of Soy and the Cerrado Working Group in Brazil

“…Similar legitimacy is conferred to soy as the choice engine of regional development in the Cerrado, to be balanced only against conservation interests. Attributes such as soy's contribution to economic growth, or its correlation with higher Human Development Indexes 14 in Cerrado municipalities, are taken as evidence of a socially beneficial role (see Martinelli et al, 2017). Its skewed distribution of benefits and burdens that augments inequality (Garrett and Rausch, 2016) is generally overlooked, as are socioeconomic attributes on which soy underperforms when compared to other agricultural land uses (e.g., fruit and vegetable crops in Brazil create 25 times more direct and indirect jobs per hectare than soy does 15 ; CNA Abrafrutas, 2018).…”

Telecoupled Food Trade Affects Pericoupled Trade and Intracoupled Production

“…The soybean trade is representative of the ways in which distant people and places are connected through telecoupling. In the context of the global food trade, much research has been conducted on the large flow of soybeans from the Americas to China [12][13][14][15][16]. For example, many studies have documented production increases in Brazil and the United States (U.S.) as well as several other countries between adjacent systems, while telecouplings examine human-nature interactions across distance.…”

Cultivating Alternatives to Authoritarian Populism in Amazonia

“…Crucially, revenue per head of cattle has traditionally been low in the Portal of Amazonia and only very large ranches yield substantial income (Aldrich et al 2006). Large-scale landholders, moreover, responded to the soil depletion that is an inherent feature of ranching (grasses extract nutrients from the soil that is not replenished in the cattle-breeding process) by abandoning depleted lands and extending their properties into forests-one reason that extensive ranching contributed to very high deforestation rates in the late 1980s and 1990s (Lapola et al 2014;Martinelli et al 2017).…”