بررسی معجزه سرادو در کشاورزی برزیل

Brazil’s emergence as a primary global agricultural producer is often credited to production expansion into soils of the Brazilian savannah or Cerrado. These soils are, however, deficient in important nutrients and prone to degradation, requiring input-intensive processes that suggest a low level of productive efficiency. Employing a sequence of agricultural censuses and a biome approach for characterizing agricultural zones, the present study evaluates the Cerrado’s total factor productivity growth and productive potential. The analysis highlights the resource cost of Brazil’s “Cerrado Miracle,” the role of paved road infrastructure in expanding production opportunities, and the significant production gains that the Cerrado may yet achieve. Results suggest a substantial productivity gap between the Cerrado’s most efficient and average producers, implying that Cerrado production might well be further boosted if average producers succeed in adopting the technologies and management practices of the more efficient operators. More generally, and to the extent the Cerrado model is generalizable elsewhere, agricultural development of the world’s savannahs, such as Sub-Saharan Africa’s Guinea regions, into breadbaskets will be expensive in terms of material inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, depending for their success therefore on the real prices of these inputs.

Shortly after the 2007–2008 food price crisis, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimated global food production would, by mid-century, need to rise 70% to feed an additional 2.3 billion people (FAO, 2009). FAO expressed cautious optimism when saying that such a boost likely would require 120 million more hectares of arable land, pointing to Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America as potential sources of farmland expansion. That optimism may in part be driven by Brazil’s successful agricultural transformation of its broad savannah, the Cerrado. Some analysts now consider some of the world’s other savannah regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa’s vast Guinea Savannah, to have the potential to become new breadbaskets, in part because of the agro-climatic characteristics they share with the Brazilian Cerrado (Morris et al., 2012).

This paper finds that agricultural production in the Brazilian savannah has been highly resource-intensive. While the Cerrado’s most efficient farms have accelerated production in part through substantial efficiency improvements, the majority of farms have boosted production largely through greater resource use. This suggests that any agricultural transformation of native savannah, in the Brazilian Cerrado, Guinea Savannah, or elsewhere, will have high resource cost. Paved road investments have played a significant role in boosting the productivity growth of the Cerrado’s most efficient producers. Because road-paving impacts have varied widely across biomes, such infrastructural investments appear to bring a particularly high return when targeted toward areas in which paved roads are a major limitation to agricultural growth.