RESUMO
The global trade of agricultural commodities has profound social-ecological impacts, from potentially increasing food availability and agricultural efficiency, to displacing local communities, and to incentivizing environmental destruction. Supply chain stickiness, understood as the stability in trading relationships between supply chain actors, moderates the impacts of agricultural commodity production and the possibilities for supply-chain interventions. However, what factors determine stickiness, that is, how and why farmers, traders, food processors, and consumer countries, develop and maintain trading relationships with specific producing regions, remains unclear. Here, we use data on the Brazilian soy supply chain, a mixed methods approach based on extensive actor-based fieldwork, and an explanatory regression model, to identify and explore the factors that influence stickiness between places of production and supply chain actors. We find four groups of factors to be important: economic incentives, institutional enablers and constraints, social and power dimensions, and biophysical and technological conditions. Among the factors we explore, surplus capacity in soy processing infrastructure, (i.e., crushing and storage facilities) is important in increasing stickiness, as is export-oriented production. Conversely, volatility in market demand expressed by farm-gate soy prices and lower land-tenure security are key factors reducing stickiness. Importantly, we uncover heterogeneity and context-specificity in the factors determining stickiness, suggesting tailored supply-chain interventions are beneficial. Understanding supply chain stickiness does not, in itself, provide silver-bullet solutions to stopping deforestation, but it is a crucial prerequisite to understanding the relationships between supply chain actors and producing regions, identifying entry points for supply chain sustainability interventions, assessing the effectiveness of such interventions, forecasting the restructuring of trade flows, and considering sourcing patterns of supply chain actors in territorial planning.
RESUMO
Agricultural expansion into subtropical and tropical forests causes major environmental damage, but its wider social impacts often remain hidden. Forest-dependent smallholders are particularly strongly impacted, as they crucially rely on forest resources, are typically poor, and often lack institutional support. Our goal was to assess forest-smallholder dynamics in relation to expanding commodity agriculture. Using high-resolution satellite images across the entire South American Gran Chaco, a global deforestation hotspot, we digitize individual forest-smallholder homesteads (n = 23,954) and track their dynamics between 1985 and 2015. Using a Bayesian model, we estimate 28,125 homesteads in 1985 and show that forest smallholders occupy much larger forest areas (>45% of all Chaco forests) than commonly appreciated and increasingly come into conflict with expanding commodity agriculture (18% of homesteads disappeared; n = 5,053). Importantly, we demonstrate an increasing ecological marginalization of forest smallholders, including a substantial forest resource base loss in all Chaco countries and an increasing confinement to drier regions (Argentina and Bolivia) and less accessible regions (Bolivia). Our transferable and scalable methodology puts forest smallholders on the map and can help to uncover the land-use conflicts at play in many deforestation frontiers across the globe. Such knowledge is essential to inform policies aimed at sustainable land use and supply chains.
Assuntos
Agricultura , Conservação dos Recursos Naturais , Florestas , Mapeamento Geográfico , Marginalização Social , Humanos , América do SulRESUMO
Carbon emissions from land-use changes in tropical dry forest systems are poorly understood, although they are likely globally significant. The South American Chaco has recently emerged as a hot spot of agricultural expansion and intensification, as cattle ranching and soybean cultivation expand into forests, and as soybean cultivation replaces grazing lands. Still, our knowledge of the rates and spatial patterns of these land-use changes and how they affected carbon emissions remains partial. We used the Landsat satellite image archive to reconstruct land-use change over the past 30 years and applied a carbon bookkeeping model to quantify how these changes affected carbon budgets. Between 1985 and 2013, more than 142 000 km2 of the Chaco's forests, equaling 20% of all forest, was replaced by croplands (38.9%) or grazing lands (61.1%). Of those grazing lands that existed in 1985, about 40% were subsequently converted to cropland. These land-use changes resulted in substantial carbon emissions, totaling 824 Tg C between 1985 and 2013, and 46.2 Tg C for 2013 alone. The majority of these emissions came from forest-to-grazing-land conversions (68%), but post-deforestation land-use change triggered an additional 52.6 Tg C. Although tropical dry forests are less carbon-dense than moist tropical forests, carbon emissions from land-use change in the Chaco were similar in magnitude to those from other major tropical deforestation frontiers. Our study thus highlights the urgent need for an improved monitoring of the often overlooked tropical dry forests and savannas, and more broadly speaking the value of the Landsat image archive for quantifying carbon fluxes from land change.