Ranching and the new global range: Amazonia in the 21st
Century
This paper is based upon the idea that the Amazonian basin
is slowly degrading from the soy industry, cattle industry, and expansion of
the federal interstates.
The infrastructure of Brazil is very wide and pre-1990’s it
was extremely difficult to travel with in the Country, as shown in fig. 1. The 1968 to 1995 the 200-hour drive from Bao
Vista to Belem has been greatly reduced to around a 50-hour drive. This leads
to the fact that cattle and soy can now be easily transported from Bao Vista to
the bigger cities and to the coast. The greatly reduced drive time was due to
the improvement and construction of more roads. As shown in Fig. 2, the areas
with the densest cattle are centered on major highway intersections. The
transportation of more cattle has been due to the road improvements, but the
demand for Brazilian cattle is due to location rents, enhancement on animal
health, monetary and trade policy, and beef international demand.
This creates a problem with the Amazonian basin because
cattle ranching, which is located in remote areas of Brazil destroys too much
forestland and destroys the soil. There are two ways that cattle ranchers can
decrease the negative impact through agricultural intensifications and forest
encroachment under a multi-crop Thunian system.
Walker, R., Browder, J., Arima, E., Simmons, C., Pereira, R., Caldus, M., Shirota, R., & de Zen, S. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718508001802
This is interesting to think about. Do you think that the cattle and soy industries will eventually cause industrialization in Brazil? If it's already increased the amount of roads in the country, will the amount of roads continue to increase while the industry increases? Also, if Brazil is industrialized, will they continue to handle cattle and soy production or will that economy move to another country?
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to see how roads speed up development in the Amazon. GIS can be used to track changes overtime in the area and reveal if roads cause further deforestation due to expanding networks, such as gasoline stations, mechanic shops, hotels, and restaurants. Roads may cause increase deforestation because people are moving out into the Amazon to bring goods and services to the cattle ranchers and truckers. GIS should also be used to determine the cost and benefits of building a road that far. It may be that the highway is too expensive because of maintenance costs. How many people use the road and what are their costs for using it? Maybe the government can make the highway into a toll road so that cattle ranches can incorporate their environmental damages into their production functions.
ReplyDeleteIt's cool that GIS is being used to track all the changes that are happening here. I feel like because it has the ability to track multiple
ReplyDeleteissues and show it all at once so that you can easily see the data is a huge help.
It would be interesting to see how roads have connected these industries to see which one caused the other. Many times one industry causes another to join in in order to gain money. This could be graphed by each year and see the different industries expand together or apart. This is an issue in many countries even here in the U.S. where interstates or even country roads are being laid right across farms and forests. So although farming and ranching is bad for forest degradation, it can actually lead to more plant life a growth later on. Many farmers use tree rows to protect their crops, which could lead to a new growth in trees.
ReplyDelete