09-05 "The Environmental Impacts of Soybean Expansion and Infrastructure Development in Brazil’s Amazon Basin"

For decades, the development of transportation infrastructure in the Brazilian Amazon has been the government’s main social and economic development policy in the region. Reductions in transportation costs have not only opened the agricultural frontier to cattle ranching and logging but have also caused more than two-thirds of Amazonian deforestation. Currently, soybean cultivation is a new economic force demanding improvements to roads in the region. Profitable soybean crops have spread over the Mato Grosso’s cerrados and now head toward the core of the Amazon rain forest. One of the main constraints for soy expansion into the Amazon has been the poor condition of roads. In this study, we analyze the effect Amazon transportation infrastructure programs have on soybean expansion by lowering transport costs. The analysis is based on spatial estimates of transportation costs for the soybean sector, first using current road networks and then projecting changes based on the paving of the Cuiabá-Santarém road. Our results indicate that paving the Cuiabá-Santarém road would reduce transportation costs by an average of $10 per ton for farmers located in the northern part of Mato Grosso, by allowing producers to reroute soybean shipments to the Santarém port. Paving the road also would expand the area where growing soybeans is economically feasible by about 70 percent, from 120,000 to 205,000 km2. Most of this new area would be located in the state of Pará and is covered largely by forests. A Cost-Benefit analysis of the road project indicates that the investments in infrastructure would generate more than$180 million for soybean farmers over a period of twenty years. These benefits, however, ignore the project’s environmental impacts. If the destruction of ecological services and products provided by the existing forests is accounted for, then the Cuiabá-Santarém investment would generate a net loss of between $762 million and$1.9 billion. This result shows the importance of including the value of the natural capital in feasibility studies of infrastructure projects to reflect their real benefits to society as a whole.

Impacts of Biofuel Production and Navigation Impediments on Agricultural Transportation and Markets

This study investigated the impacts of U.S. biofuel production and barge navigation impediments on agricultural transportation and markets. Both past and future impacts of U.S. biofuel production levels mandated by the Renewable Fuel Standards of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (RFS1) and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (RFS2) were examined. Examination of barge navigations impediments included analysis of the impact of lock failure and low water levels on rivers due to drought, on agricultural transportation, and on consumer welfare. All scenarios were simulated using the International Grain Transportation Model, a price endogenous mathematical programming model. The results showed that RFS-associated (RFS1 and RFS2) U.S. corn ethanol production increased the total corn supply and diverted corn from non-ethanol consumption, reduced regional grain transportation volumes, and contributed to a rise in corn prices. The results of the forward-looking scenarios indicated that grain exports and transport volumes were increased. Exports from Gulf ports increased by 41%, while grain movements by rail increased by 60%. Additional investments in the expansion of the grain handling capacities of Gulf ports and the railroad industry are needed in the near future unless a large increase in biofuel production occurs. The results of navigation impediment scenarios indicated that both lock failures and low water levels on rivers adversely affect U.S. grain exports. The Gulf ports were most negatively impacted, relative to Pacific Northwest and Atlantic ports. Truck and barge freight volume declined while rail freight volume increased. Because trucks deliver grain from grain elevators to barge locations, truck volume also decreased in response to the decline in barge volume. The scenarios imposed welfare losses on society with most accruing to consumers, while the barge industry lost $10-154 million in revenue. The low water levels were more expensive than the lock failures. Major rehabilitation of the locks is needed to avoid lock failures and more dredging of the shallow parts of the river system is required because of frequent droughts

Climate Variability Poses a Correlated Risk to Global Food Production

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which refers to a coupling between equatorial Pacific Ocean and atmosphere anomalies, is a major source of interannual climate variability. Although it is fundamentally a tropical Pacific phenomena, both warm (El Niño) and cold (La Niña) events alter atmospheric circulations -- and subsequently temperature and precipitation patterns -- well into the mid- latitudes. Furthermore, both El Niño and La Niña have characteristic multi-year life cycles of sea surface temperature and zonal wind anomalies. The research in this thesis focuses on understanding whether the global teleconnections and multi-year evolution of El Niño and La Niña imposes a risk of synchronous or sequential crop failures relevant to global food production. In the first chapter, which focuses on maize, wheat and soy in the Americas, we analyze the dynamics underlying ENSO life cycles to illustrate which aspects of the system are most important for agriculture. In North America, the same-season teleconnections affecting soybean and maize have been well studied, but we demonstrate the importance of lagged soil moisture teleconnections for wheat in the southern Great Plains. In South America, peak ENSO sea surface temperature (SST) teleconnections are concurrent with, and therefore critical for, wheat and maize growing seasons while soil moisture memory in Argentina plays an important role during the soybean growing season In the second chapter we show how the teleconnections from chapter one lead to correlated crop production anomalies in North and South America. We estimate the magnitude of ENSO-induced Pan-American production anomalies and discuss how increasing crop harvesting frequency may affect Pan-American production variability. We find that ENSO-induced production anomalies are greatest for maize, with median anomalies of about 5% of Pan-American production. After broadly characterizing ENSO-induced production anomalies, we demonstrate that they are not static in time. Increasing crop harvesting frequency in Brazil has affected the correlated risks posed by ENSO to soybeans and maize. In the third chapter we expand our analysis of agriculturally relevant teleconnections to the greater Pacific Basin region, and move beyond observations into model simulations. In this chapter we propose a coherent framework for understanding how trans-Pacific ENSO teleconnections pose a correlated risk to crop yields in major agricultural belts of the Americas, Australia and China over the course of an ENSO life cycle. The potential for consecutive ENSO-induced yield anomalies is of particular interest in these major food producing areas, where modest changes in yield have significant effects on global markets. We demonstrate that ENSO teleconnections relevant for crop flowering seasons are the result of a single trans-Pacific circulation anomaly that develops in boreal summer and persists through the following spring. These trans-Pacific ENSO teleconnections are often (but not always) offsetting between major producing regions in the Americas and those in northern China or Australia. Multi-year La Niñas, however, only tend to force multi-year growing season anomalies in Argentina and Australia. In our final chapter we estimate of the relative contribution of major modes of climate variability to crop yield variability at the global scale. We consider the influence of not only ENSO, but also the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), tropical Atlantic variability (TAV) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). We find that modes of climate variability account for 18.4%, 7.4% and 5.4% of globally aggregated maize, soy and wheat production variability, respectively. All modes of variability are important in at least one region studied, but only ENSO has a significant influence on global production. The low fractions of global-scale soy and wheat production variability attributable to climate is a result of significant but offsetting ENSO-induced yield anomalies in major production regions. Our findings represent an observationally-derived limit on the importance of climate variability to crop production stability that is not dependent on the fidelity of present generation of climate or crop models. In terms of synchronous crop failures within a single harvest year, we find that ENSO poses a significant correlated risk to maize yields but that it has a much smaller effect on global wheat and soy production. ENSO-forced maize production anomalies offset less than wheat and soy at the global scale because production is concentrated in regions with same-sign yield anomalies, notably the United States and Southeast Africa. To illustrate this point, we show that ENSO is largely responsible for the largest synchronous maize failure in the post-1960 historical record. These results demonstrate how the distribution of global cropland in relation to ENSO teleconnections contributes significantly to the presence for maize or absence for wheat and soy of synchronous global crop failure

Financing sustainable agriculture and mitigation

Key messages: - Smallholder farmers and forestry producers have a crucial role to play in food security, sustainable land use and emissions reductions initiatives. - Producers and investors alike require appropriate incentive structures to facilitate participation in sustainable land use initiatives. - A networked financing approach—Inari—may provide an innovative response to financing sustainable land use via intelligent diversification and addressing the finance needs of smallholders. - Diversification requires the development of a more holistic risk model for investment in smallholder agriculture and forestry, which will be tested in a number of developing countries in 2013 and 2014

Transportation research needs and issues for Chinese agriculture

Interprovincial circulation of grain and wholesale markets in China / Wu Shuo -- Inter-state/province grain transportation in the U.S. and China / Tenpao Lee, Robert J. Hauser, Stanley R. Thompson, and Barbara J. Hrutka -- Methodology and data systems for study of transportation / Won W. Koo and Jerry Fruin -- An application of a spatial equilibrium model to analyze the impact on China's trade of a policy change / Shwu-Eng H. Webb, Catherine K. Halbrendt, Rajaram Gana, and Francis Tuan -- Possible Joint Chinese and U.S. grain transportation and distribution research opportunities / Roland R. Robinson and Donald W. Larson -- Transportation research needs and issues for Chinese agriculture: discussion of session presentations / Dale G. Anderso

Applications of advanced transport aircraft in developing countries

Four representative market scenarios were studied to evaluate the relative performance of air-and surface-based transportation systems in meeting the needs of two developing contries, Brazil and Indonesia, which were selected for detailed case studies. The market scenarios were: remote mining, low-density transport, tropical forestry, and large cargo aircraft serving processing centers in resource-rich, remote areas. The long-term potential of various aircraft types, together with fleet requirements and necessary technology advances, is determined for each application

Global soybean trade - the geopolitics of a bean

Following a collaborative effort and with the support of The UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI GCRF), the Trade, Development and the Environment Hub -- or simply Trade Hub, https://tradehub.earth/ -- has recently launched the report “Global Soybean Trade – The Geopolitics of a Bean”. Originally cultivated as a traditional staple food in China, soybean today is of the most important global commodities in international trade. The report examines the economics of the ‘soybean miracle’, exploring its complex – and often controversial – implications for people and ecosystems, and analysing how different institutions and stakeholders are addressing the growing sustainability concerns. This publication not only provide a comprehensive review of the existing publications and data, but also highlights some of the open questions that need to be addressed by Trade Hub partners and other stakeholders in order to increase the sustainability of the soybean supply chain, both globally and locally

The Age of the Soybean

The soybean is far more than just a versatile crop whose derivates serve the protein needs of a meatless diet. One of the world’s most important commodities, soy represents the embodiment of mechanised industrial agriculture and is one of the main actors behind the socioeconomic, political and ecological transformations of industrial farming in several world regions. Despite the crop’s potential as a cheap source of vegetal protein for human consumers, most industrial soybean production has fuelled the global meat industrial complex, as animal feed. Soybean is thus, paradoxically, still a relatively ‘invisible’ crop to the public at large, although its global yields continue to increase at stupendous rates, lining the pockets of agribusiness and to the detriment of traditional agriculture. The transnational socio-ecological and economic entanglements characterising this versatile legume’s global expansion have prompted scholarly attention as researchers around the world have begun to unveil the main historical drivers behind the rise of the soybean in the global food chain. This book aims to expand the analysis, offering the most significant effort so far at an environmental history of soybeans. Interrogating the socioeconomic and ecological transformations determined by (and determining) the rise of soy in international food chains during the Great Acceleration, the volume gathers contributions from an international cast of researchers, working in numerous geographical contexts, from Japan and China, to India, African nations, the Southern Cone of Latin America, Northern Europe and the United States. Soybean farming, breeding, processing and marketing have bound together the histories of these diverse regions and altered beyond recognition their ecological and socio-economic contexts

Connected Brazil and digital humanities: the perspective of interpreting museums in Porto Alegre

A connected society implies a new concept of cultural patrimony which starts to exist when the space is changing from physical to the one of data flow. Cyberspace and new technologies in cultural institutions provide up-to-date information to their public that has the potential of acting as a co-author by creating and sharing. Accessing cultural information of the museum's collection online through the screen or electronic device is a global trend and leads individuals to interact, exchange knowledge and absorb social change. Can one think that it is the “Digital Age” that is imposing itself on teaching during the pandemic? Can you imagine that everyone will migrate to digital on equal terms, including the population most vulnerable to poverty? Are digital educational resources within easy reach of the entire student community? Do all families have sufficient digital literacy and financial conditions to assist and enable their children to access and use digital tools? The answers seem obvious. It is not possible to disregard or pretend to be a minor problem, which was known before the covid-19: the digital inequality. It has already been revealed that the place where you live defines insertion in the digital world. The outskirts of Porto Alegre, like many others in Brazil, are full of families with school-age children who face serious obstacles to accessing the world wide web. Difficulties ranging from not being able to buy a computer to being unable to pay the cost of equipment or connection services. That is why they are classified, in the surveys, as “second-class users”, for making use of the internet based on more limited tools, such as cell phones, limited data access and access in public places. Digital inequalities connected with the pandemic. The article analyzes the connected Brazilian society and characterizes its involvement in the social media using the example of the museums of the city of Porto Alegre

Automotive air pollution : issues and options for developing countries

Air pollution constitutes an ominous threat to human health and welfare. Its adverse effects are pervasive and may be disaggregated at three levels: (a) local, confined to urban and industrial centers; (b) regional, pertaining to transboundary transport of pollutants; and (c) global, related to build up of greenhouse gases. These effects have been observed globally but the characteristics and scale of the air pollution problem in developing countries are not known; nor has the problem been researched and evaluated to the same extent as in industrialized countries. Air pollution, however, can no longer be regarded as a local or a regional issue as it has global repercussions in terms of the greenhouse effect and depletion of the ozone layer. This paper discusses the contribution of motorized land transport to air pollution problems, with special reference to developing countries. It assesses the adverse effects of air pollution from transport sources, primarily motor vehicles, and reviews possible approaches to bring about improvements. The paper identifies key issues and research needs related to land transport and air pollution in developing countriesTransport and Environment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Montreal Protocol,Energy and Environment,Roads&Highways