Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Amazon forest, with little or no international awareness. Nevertheless,
precise statistics on its status are not available. The Brazilian Forest Act,
currently under review, mandates that variable but considerable (e.g.,
>80% in the Amazon) tracts of private lands must be set up for preserva-
tion at the owner's expense. In theory, this approach could result in a wide-
spread preservation throughout all biomes. In practice, however, this law
was never fully enforced. Wherever enforced, it has resulted in a mosaic
of unconnected fragments of native vegetation, which have some ecosys-
tems services (e.g., water infiltration and erosion control), but fall short of
providing adequate habitat for biodiversity, especially when surrounded
by croplands (Carvalho et al. 2009). In addition, the status of public lands
under native vegetation is even less clear: although government-managed
nature reserves are common in the Amazon and the Atlantic Rainforest,
they comprise merely 2.2% of the Cerrado area (Klink and Machado
2005). Most of these areas are preserved only because either of unsuit-
able slopes or of too infertile soils for agriculture. With about half of the
Cerrado already converted to agriculture (Sano et al. 2010), there is still
time for better land use planning that allows for adequate agricultural
development and nature conservation, but in fact, the prospects for that
are not good since the present laws are mostly superficial and are poorly
enforced.
(4)
Physical and economical infrastructure.
These are severe challenges
to agricultural development, mostly caused by obsolete public policies.
Physical infrastructure limitations (e.g., lack of on-farm grain storage, the
sparse and unfunctional network of roads and railways) are obvious hin-
drances to agricultural development and profitability for Brazil as a whole,
especially in the Cerrado (Lopes, A.S., personal communication 2011). Less
obvious to international readers and investors are the extremely high inter-
est rates (~10% year
-1
), taxation (~38% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP),
more than double of that in the United States), and heavy payroll costs.
During the early years of Cerrado settlement, interests on public loans were
equally high but got diluted by a steep annual inflation rate (Klink and
Moreira 2002), and the net taxation was much lower. With current inflation
rates similar to those of industrial countries, interest rates are accountably
higher. While this obstacle can be passed by international credit, the same
cannot be said for high taxation and payroll costs. Nevertheless, Cerrado
agriculture has developed and prevailed despite these limitations, which
probably will persist for decades to come. Finally, these hindrances have
one unintended bright side, at least from an environmental viewpoint:
deforestation and ecosystem degradation in Brazil have historically been
related to economic growth and infrastructure development. It is amply
clear and evident that unless adequate land use planning is devised and rig-
orously enforced, the long-due modernization of physical, legal, and fiscal
infrastructure in Brazil would undoubtedly develop Cerrado agriculture at
the sheer expense of its rich biodiversity.
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