Brazil's New Green Revolution: Capital, Investment, and Agricultural Expansion

巴西的新绿色革命：资本、投资和农业扩张

• 批准号: 1305489
• 负责人: Leah VanWey
• 金额: $ 25.5万
• 依托单位: Brown University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-08-01 至 2016-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1305489&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Brazil; New; Green; Revolution; Capital

The Brazilian Amazon, long viewed as vital to the maintenance of global environmental balances, has now also become one of the world's most rapidly growing agricultural frontiers. Since 1990, broad-acre agricultural systems, led by favorable conditions for soybean production, have expanded by more than 80,000km² in the emerging production frontiers in Brazil's Center-West and Northern regions. The growth of soybean production in these areas has come with both economic benefits and environmental costs; and this region is poised to continue growing as a production center. Where and to what extent this expansion takes place will have enormous consequences not only for broader scale questions of environmental sustainability and food supplies, but also locally, as rapidly developing agricultural counties attempt to balance the potential returns from agriculture with maintaining a healthy and sustainable environment. Intellectual Merit:This research considers a key aspect of Brazil's agricultural transformation. The focus is on the role of capital generation and credit scarcity in constraining and shaping the location and extent of Brazil's agricultural growth. Specifically, how people and capital are redistributed from sources of capital generation to capital scarce, marginal regions and how land managers' investments are constrained to self-financing on past returns or peer to peer exchanges based on agricultural futures. The question how land managers choose between multiple investment pathways as capital becomes available or, specifically, whether they seek to (1) intensify on already productive parcels through double (or even triple) cropping systems, or (2)seek out and convert existing pastures or forests in new locations to cropland is also addressed. The work is approached by conceptualizing the issue at hand within an interdisciplinary model built on theories from geography, economics, and migration studies. The research plan includes the collection of quantifiable survey data and qualitative interviews conducted in three, strategically-located study agricultural frontier regions. Whereas the survey work aims at establishing quantitative, population-level relationships, the qualitative work attempts to gather more specific information on the processes that underlie this relationship. To set the responses with a spatial and physical structure, the projects links field information to location-specific data through a GIS. In summary, the main intellectual merits of this work include (1) an innovative, interdisciplinary conceptual approach to understanding the movement of people and their resources, and (2) the integration of socioeconomic survey of broad-acre farmers with MODIS satellite image based data products indicating land use intensity with GIS data.Broader Impacts: The BROADER IMPACTS of this proposal comprise (1) a policy oriented evaluation of area specific constraints on land intensification across three critical agricultural frontiers; (2) Professional growth of the Fellow (Richards), which includes administering and developing the research project and new training in migration studies and survey methods; and (3) the continued development of a research network that that includes scientists at multiple US and Brazilian institutions.This project is co-funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE).

巴西亚马逊河流域长期以来被视为维持全球环境平衡的关键，现在也成为世界上增长最快的农业前沿之一。自1990年以来，在巴西中西部和北方地区新兴的生产前沿地区，以大豆生产的有利条件为主导的大面积农业系统已扩大了8万多平方公里。这些地区大豆产量的增长带来了经济效益和环境成本;该地区有望继续成为生产中心。这种扩张发生在哪里以及在多大程度上发生，不仅对环境可持续性和粮食供应的更广泛问题产生巨大影响，而且对当地也产生巨大影响，因为快速发展的农业县试图平衡农业的潜在回报与保持健康和可持续的环境。智力优势：这项研究考虑了巴西农业转型的一个关键方面。重点是资本生成和信贷稀缺在限制和塑造巴西农业增长的地点和程度方面的作用。具体而言，人和资本如何从资本生成来源重新分配到资本稀缺的边缘地区，土地管理者的投资如何被限制在基于过去回报的自筹资金或基于农业期货的点对点交易所。土地管理者如何在资本可用时在多种投资途径之间进行选择，或者具体地说，他们是否寻求（1）通过双（甚至三）种作物制度加强已经生产的地块，或者（2）寻找并将新地点的现有牧场或森林转化为耕地。这项工作是通过概念化的问题，在一个跨学科的模型建立在地理学，经济学和移民研究的理论。研究计划包括收集可量化的调查数据和定性访谈，在三个战略定位的研究农业前沿地区进行。调查工作旨在建立人口一级的数量关系，而质量工作则试图收集关于这种关系所依据的过程的更具体的资料。为了使应对措施具有空间和物理结构，这些项目通过地理信息系统将实地信息与特定地点的数据联系起来。总之，这项工作的主要知识价值包括：（1）一种创新的、跨学科的概念方法来理解人口及其资源的流动;（2）将大面积农民的社会经济调查与基于MODIS卫星图像的数据产品相结合，通过GIS数据显示土地利用强度。该建议的更广泛的意义包括：（1）对三个关键农业边界上土地集约化的具体限制因素进行政策导向的评估;（2）院士的专业成长（理查兹），其中包括管理和发展研究项目以及移徙研究和调查方法方面的新培训;以及（3）继续发展一个包括美国和巴西多个机构的科学家的研究网络。该项目由国际科学与工程办公室（OISE）共同资助。