RESUMO
Over the last several decades, Brazil has become both the world's leading soy producer and the world's leading consumer of hazardous pesticides. Despite identified links between pesticide exposure and carcinogenesis, there has been little population-level research on the effects of pesticide intensification on broader human health in Brazil. We estimate the relationship between expanded soy production-and related community exposure to pesticides-on childhood cancer incidence using 15 y of data on disease mortality. We find a statistically significant increase in pediatric leukemia following expanded local soy production, but timely access to treatment mitigates this relationship. We show that pesticide exposure likely occurs via water supply penetration. Our findings represent only the tip of the iceberg for substantial health externalities of high-input crop production and land use change. Our results are of particular interest in developing contexts with demand for intensified food production systems and underscore the need for stronger regulation of pesticides and increased public health attention to exposure in the broader community.
Assuntos
Neoplasias , Praguicidas , Criança , Humanos , Brasil/epidemiologia , Neoplasias/epidemiologia , Agricultura/métodos , Praguicidas/toxicidade , Produção AgrícolaRESUMO
Between 2004 and 2012, multiple policies contributed to one of the great conservation successes of the twenty-first century-an 84% decrease in the rate of Brazilian Amazon deforestation. Among the most prominent of these policies is the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM), an agreement by grain traders not to purchase soy grown on recently deforested land. The ASM inspired widespread adoption of similar zero-deforestation commitments, but its impact is poorly understood due to its overlap with other conservation policies. Here, we apply an econometric triple-differences model to remotely sensed deforestation data to isolate the ASM's impact within Brazil's Arc of Deforestation. We show that the ASM reduced deforestation in soy-suitable locations in the Amazon by 0.66 ± 0.32 percentage points relative to a counterfactual control, preventing 18,000 ± 9,000 km2 of deforestation over its first decade (2006-2016). Although these results highlight potential benefits of private conservation policies, the ASM's success was dependent on complementarities with public property registries and deforestation monitoring.
RESUMO
The state of Mato Grosso is Brazil's agribusiness powerhouse with a cattle herd of 30.2 million head in 2017. With land use patterns heavily influenced by beef production, which requires substantial land inputs, the state is a key target for environmental conservation. Yet the spatial and temporal dynamics of slaughterhouses in Mato Grosso remain largely unknown due to data limitations. Here, we provide a novel method to map slaughterhouse expansion and contraction. We analyzed the opening and closing of 133 plants between 1967 and 2016 in Mato Grosso and estimated the geographic locations and slaughter volumes. This was achieved by triangulating across multiple data sources including a registry of 21 million companies, government records of three million slaughter transactions (Portuguese acronym GTA), and high resolution satellite imagery. Our study is the first to include longitudinal information and both inspected (for food quality) and uninspected slaughterhouses. The results show that 72 plants operated in 2016 through 52 holding companies. By measuring geographic distances between active plants and pasture areas, we documented a 29% increase in the density of plants during 2000-2016, showing an expansion of the cattle slaughter infrastructure. We identified three periods of expansion: 1967-1995, with 15.1% of the plant openings; 1996-2003, with 24.6%; and 2004-2016, with 60.3%. While closings likely occurred throughout the period studied, no data were available prior to 2002. We estimated a minimum value for the volume of uninspected slaughter as 2-3% for 2013-2016. We conclude by discussing potential applications of the data, a deidentified version of which is made available through an online repository. The method developed here can be replicated for the whole country, which would increase our understanding of the dynamics of cattle slaughter and their impact on land use.