Agriculture in Brazil: impacts, costs, and opportunities for a sustainable future

19 de dezembro de 2010

dez 19, 2010

Luiz A. Martinelli, Rosamond Naylor, Peter M Vitousek, Paulo Moutinho

Brazil has developed a large-scale commercial agricultural system, recognized worldwide for its role in domestic economic growth and expanding exports. However, the success of this sector has been associated with widespread destruction of Brazilian ecosystems, especially the Cerrado and the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, as well as environmental degradation.

Brazil’s agricultural development has also led to land consolidation, aggravating a historical land distribution inequality. This pattern of agricultural growth has reinforced Brazil’ status as one of the world’s most inequitable countries in terms of income distribution, making it difficult to assert that the nation is pursuing a sustainable development path. In order to achieve sustainable development Brazil must reconcile its increasingly productive, modern tropical agricultural system with environmental preservation, social equity, and poverty alleviation in rural and urban areas.

Although a daunting task, Brazil has the opportunity to lead tropical countries in combining modernized agriculture with highly diverse and functional ecosystems. Continued improvement in socio-economic conditions is equally important and will require stronger efforts to decrease inequalities in income and land distribution in the rural sector.

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Reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries

Reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries

WHRC and IPAM are convinced that there is now a consensus in the international community that to avoid “dangerous interference” in the global climate system (the primary objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, Article 2), tropical deforestation should be greatly reduced, as also recommended by two important reports prepared since Workshop I: the Stern Review4 and the Fourth Assessment of the IPCC5.