Impacts of agribusiness expansion in the matopiba region: communities and the enviroment

Abstract

The expansion of the agricultural and cattle-raising frontier in the Cerrado, Brazilian savannah, has led to full vegetation loss or degradation of 52% of the land in the region over the last four de cades, creating imminent threats to the future of the biome and traditional resident communities’ ways of life. Since the 1970s, in tensive and extensive farming activities, such as cattle-raising and soybean plantations, as well as sugarcane and eucalyptus, have fostered increased deforestation and soil degradation, changing the landscape and intra and extra biome ecological interactions dramatically. This has transformed, in a similarly abrupt fashion, the lives of the residents in traditional Cerrado communities. The demand for charcoal by the Brazilian iron and steel industry has also had severe impacts on the environment through increased deforestation. Finally, it also important to highlight that there are large mining and dam construction projects in the region, including those for crop irrigation. Consequently, an average of ten small rivers are going dry every year.