Balancing Agricultural Development and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Research Report 129
Balancing Agricultural Development and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon
Front Cover Image
Andrea Cattaneo
2002
ABOUT THIS REPORT

Since the 1970s, federal policies promoting migration and encouraging agricultural development of large farms, logging, and ranching have led to the deforestation of vast areas of the Amazon rainforest.Though these policies have largely been replaced, deforestation continues.What effects do current macroeconomic and regional policies and events have on deforestation and on the well-being of settlers on the agricultural frontier? This report identifies the links between the agriculture and logging sectors in the Amazon, economic growth, poverty alleviation, and natural resource degradation in the region and in Brazil as a whole. It considers the effects of currency devaluation, building roads and other infrastructure in the Amazon, property rights, adoption of technological change, and fiscal incentives and disincentives to deforest.The results are sometimes counterintuitive, but shed new light on why slowing deforestation is so difficult and on the trade-offs between environmental and economic goals.

This report will be of interest to professionals involved in rural poverty reduction, rural development, agricultural growth, food security, and the environment.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrea Cattaneo is an economist currently working at the Economic Research Service (ERS), U.S. Department of Agriculture,Washington, DC. He earned his doctorate in 1999 from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, based on research analyzing the feedback effects of land degradation on economic processes and deforestation pertaining to the Brazilian Amazon. Before joining ERS in 2000, Cattaneo worked for six years for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), where he acquired extensive experience in developing economy-wide models and applying them to the study of economic impacts of trade agreements. He is continuing his research on deforestation in Brazil by linking economy-wide modeling approaches to geographic information systems. His other areas of interest include the effectiveness of agri-environmental programs, bounded rationality applications in economics, and the use of environmental indices in the context of multi-objective decisionmaking.

DOWNLOAD
The abstract and report are available for download in PDF format as an entire document or by chapter.
Abstract Full Report
  • Table of Contents, Tables, Figures, Foreword, Acknowledgements, and Summary
  • Chapter 1: Introduction
  • Chapter 2: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon
  • Chapter 3: Modeling Interactions between the Environment and the Economy
  • Chapter 4: Model Database
  • Chapter 5: The Effects of Macroeconomic, Interregional, and Intraregional Change
  • Chapter 6: Policy Conclusions
  • Appendix A: The CGE Model
  • Appendix B: Structure of the Economy
  • Appendix C: Elasticities and Sensitivity Analysis
  • Appendix D: Results for Devaluation Scenarios
  • Appendix E: Results for Transportation Cost Reduction Scenarios
  • Appendix F: Results for Amazonian Technological Change Scenarios
  • Appendix G: Results for Non-Amazonian Technological Change Scenarios
  • References

TOP of the page