Collaborative Research: Globalization, Deforestation, and the Cattle Sector of the Braziian Amazon

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Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon represents a threat to global environmental security through potential impacts on the carbon cycle and loss of biological diversity. This project focuses on one of the leading causes of deforestation in Amazonia -- the region's rapidly expanding cattle industry. It seeks to explain this rapid expansion, and in particular to reveal the role that global markets have played, by taking a sectoral approach to identify commodity chain linkages in the industry, from slaughterhouses in the Amazon basin, to consumer demand in national and international markets. The project's conceptual lens is political economy, and it interprets growth of the Amazonian cattle sector as symptomatic of globalizing Brazilian agriculture. Project research will detail elements of this framework (1) by describing the structure of Brazil's national cattle industry, and the function of Amazonian production; (2) by statistically assessing the factors that have led to the integration of Amazonian production into national and international market networks; and (3) by producing a comparative historical analysis of the evolution of the Amazon's cattle sector behavior as manifest in two major settlement corridors. The project will also undertake a regression analysis of Amazonian deforestation that specifically addresses ranching and soybeans. Expected results include a description of the evolution of markets for Amazonian cattle products, a statistical assessment of factors leading to export to national and international markets, and an account of regional differences in the growth of the sector within Amazonia. In addition, the aggregate regression analysis will demonstrate the relative importance of ranching and soybean farming as drivers of Amazonian deforestation. Project research will fill important gaps in basic understanding about the emergence of the Amazonian cattle sector and its impact on the forest. The premise of this project is that sector growth can only be explained in the larger context of Brazil's national industry and its growing participation in global cattle product markets over time. Given cattle ranching is responsible for most of the deforestation to date in the Amazon, and given it is likely to represent a significant threat to the forest over the next few decades, understanding its structure, function, and dynamics is especially critical. The results of this project therefore, ultimately will contribute to the formation of environmental policy directed at forest conservation.