Sustainable Agricultural Intensification and the Nexus in Brazil (SAIN)

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Brazil is an important player in the international debate about food security, food production and the need to develop production methods that minimise climate impacts, land use changes and loss of tropical forests and biodiversity. These sometimes competing objectives and the damaging role of some forms of livestock production in particular, have led some commentators to suggest that a process of sustainable agricultural intensification is necessary to produce more outputs from less inputs, especially land, which has traditionally been abundant in Brazil. This new sustainable intensification agenda is an important element of a wider green growth debate in the UK and increasingly in Brazil and other emerging economies. This project considers the nexus of trade-offs inherent in the need for Brazil to sustainably intensify agricultural production to avoid local and global external costs in terms of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock production and direct and indirect land use change (by deforestation) and associated loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The wider context for this imperative is the increasing global demand for food production and Brazil's ambition to maintain its pre-eminent status as a global food commodity exporter, while maintaining domestic food security and social equality. Global climate change creates an additional stressor, with a need for Brazil to understand impacts and to make incremental or transformative adaptations to allow the agricultural systems to be more resilient to climate scenarios. The project adopts a quantitative approach to understanding the interaction between these elements. We identify a number of sustainable intensification measures that can be accommodated within farming systems of different scale across the variety of Brazilian environments (or biomes). These measures include livestock feeding, grassland improvement and housing options. We then develop a numerical optimisation model that describes different production systems and allows us to illustrate the economic and environmental trade-offs in a way that helps to inform the design of policies such as those focused on greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production and land use change (including deforestation). The project addresses the more general question of where production is appropriate and where it is not, by modelling the responses in each biome. We will also be able to address more contentious issues such as the consequences of reducing global demand (or consumption) for livestock products, which is increasingly discussed in academic and policy circles. The project combines expertise from key agricultural research institutions in Scotland (SRUC) and Brazil (Embrapa), and a key civil society organisation (Imaflora) focussed on agricultural development and sustainability in Brazil. Our proposal builds on an existing collaboration between the scientific team members and an existing model framework that we aim to improve using additional data and qualitative research of smallholder systems. A range of different stakeholders from the public, private and civil society will be involved to help develop our model structure and comment on results. The work builds on existing experience of providing evidence to the Secretary for Agricultural Policy for the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (SPA/MAPA). This advice has been used for policy development for Brazil's offer as Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) from the agricultural sector. NAMAs are voluntary emissions reduction commitments to be offered under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change. Finally the project will target significant knowledge exchange to facilitate Brazil's ambition to inform the intensification debate in other countries in the global south.