Labor requirements
“Best bet” Land-use Systems
Country reports
Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn in Brazil
Adoption Potential Of Alternative Land Use Systems
Unique id: IDA3YEXB
Source file: D:\Projects\ASB\ASB Country and Thematic reports\Brazil country report\ASB Brazil Summary Report.xml
Authors: S. Vosti, C. L. Carpentier, J. Witcover, . Carvalho dos Santos, E. Muñoz Braz, J. Ferreira Valentim, S. J. de Magalhães de Oliveira, C. Palm, F. de Souza Moreira, A. Cattaneo, A. Gillison, A. Mansur Mendes, V. Rodrigues, T. C. de Araújo Gomes, M. V. Neves d’Oliveira, E. do Amaral, S. Fujisaka, C. Castilla, T. Tomich, D. Bignell, D. Gonçalves Cordeiro, A. Hermes Vieira, R.S. Correira da Costa, M. Faminow, M. Locatelli, M. Swift, S. Weise, M. van Noordwijk, N. Sampaio, I. L. Franke, H. J. Borges de Araujo, L. M. Rossi, E. Barros, B. Feigl, S.P. Huang, J. Cares, C. Pinho de Sá, . Carneiro, P. Woomer
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Returns are not the only issue governing the feasibility of adoption; to achieve those returns, specific conditions will need to be met at different times during the production cycle. These conditions, or factor specificities, may be in relation to land (that it be of an appropriate agronomic profile), but are more critical in relation to labour,due to its relative scarcity in the western Amazon, and in relation to capital,at leastfor those systems requiring purchased inputs.
LUS with high returns to labour may be out of reach for many small-scale farmers, given the current scarcity of labour and the region’s imperfectly functioning labour markets. The coffee/rubber system demands by far the most labour—nearly 60 person-days per ha per year (Table 13, Figure 11). At the other end of the spectrum lie the traditional and more intensive forest extraction systems in Acre, which require only about 1 person-day per ha per year to manage. The system currently at the bottom of the land use trajectory, traditional pasture/cattle, requires the least labour of any system other than the forest systems, approximately 11 person-days per ha per year; its intensified version, improved pasture/cattle, needs only a little more than this (Vosti et al, 2002). Clustered at 1.5 to 2.0 times the labour requirements of these systems are two other intensified systems, coffee/bandarra and improved fallows, as well as the vanished shifting cultivation (annual crop/fallow) system.
Figure 11 reveals the LUS that might fail to meet farmer adoption criteria due to their excessive labour requirements. The data on system labour requirements from Table 13 are plotted on the horizontal axis in relation to two vertical dashed lines marking the actual availability of household labour observed for the two colonization projects studied.[1]The vertical axis of the same figure shows the returns to labour, while the horizontal dashed line indicates the average wage.
Since households
in Theobroma (RO) are smaller and older than their counterparts in Pedro
Peixoto (AC) and have, on average, about a third less available household
labour (22 person-days per year, compared with 38 in Acre), they may not have
the family labour necessary to adopt LUS that are feasible in the ‘younger’
colonization project in
[1] Household labor availability is measured in terms of the mean person-days available for economic activities (on or off the farm) per ha of cleared area per year, averaged over the life of the system, adjusting for the gender and age characteristics of the average household and for the leisure patterns prevalent among small-scale farmers (for details, see Vosti et al, 2002). Labor requirements may differ widely between the establishment and operational phases for some systems, or from one month to the next for others. These variations substantially affect adoptability (for details, see Muñoz Braz et al, 1999).