Meta land uses and intensification

“Best bet” Land-use Systems

Country reports

Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn in Brazil

Tradeoffs Between Objectives

Unique id: IDAJOFXB

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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Some LUS did better than others with regard not only to farmers’ well-being but also to the provision of environmental services, notably carbon sequestration and plant biodiversity. Each intensified system offers some benefits, either to the farmer or to the environment, over the traditional system, but none comes without some tradeoffs or obstacles to adoption. Managed forestry (although still experimental) holds great promise in terms of meeting agronomic sustainability and global environmental concerns, in addition to the concern for income generation. Among the systems with perennials, coffee/bandarra competes closely with more intensive pure stands of coffee in terms of profitability (if start-up costs can be covered) and will almost certainly sequester more carbon. For pasture, an improved system involving changes in both pasture species and cattle management can dramatically boost incomes, but establishment costs are high and the environment will suffer much more than it would under tree-based systems. An annual crop/fallow cycle using improved fallow could prove viable, given its higher profitability; carbon gains would be negligible, but plant biodiversity would benefit.

Despite these apparent differences, the intensified systems also have some features in common, particularly as regards their adoptability. As mentioned above, all intensified systems increase returns to land and labour (compared with traditional systems) and, except for managed forests, raise no major new problems as regards non-market institutional obstacles or food security. They do, on the other hand, entail higher levels of labour and capital inputs (except for the improved fallow system) and heightened dependence on the markets for these. From the farmers’ perspective, they all offer some benefits, but their adoption also presents obstacles that are not easily overcome. Capital, and perhaps labour, barriers might be eased if more attention were paid to technologies that could be adopted piecemeal or could be easily adapted by farmers given their current knowledge, thereby reducing the perception of risk so prevalent in a frontier environment (Faminow, 1997;1998; Faminow et al, 1999).