Since the 1970s, large-scale agriculture has advanced across the savannas in the center of Brazil, known as the Cerrado. Agricultural development has contributed to the country’s emergence as one of the top global producers of agricultural commodities. With the expansion of industrial agriculture, more than half of the Cerrado’s original vegetation has been destroyed. Yet the biome remains one of the least protected in Brazil, with less than 3 percent within legally-designated conservation areas. Brazil’s recently announced Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), now a part of the Paris Agreement from COP21, makes no mention of the Cerrado, despite the growing rate of deforestation there. Paradoxically, a successful moratorium on new deforestation for soy production in the Brazilian Amazon — in place since 2006 and recently extended indefinitely — also seems to have accelerated expansion of the soy frontier into the far more threatened Cerrado biome. This type of development threatens the region’s rich cultural history, indigenous peoples and traditional communities, biodiversity, and freshwater resources.
The northern expanse of the biome is known as Matopiba because it comprises portions of the states of Maranhao, Tocantins, Piau, and Bahia. It contains the last remaining large intact expanse of native Cerrado, and on that basis should be at the center of regional conservation efforts. But it is also the leading edge of the expansion of industrial agriculture. Two thirds of annual deforestation in the Cerrado over the past six years has taken place in this region. Current and proposed development pose a serious threat that could jeopardize the lands and livelihoods of the region’s indigenous peoples and traditional communities, including afro-descendant quilombola populations with unique cultural heritage.
With a focus on Matopiba and the issues that have been brought sharply into focus there, a new report, Challenges and Opportunities for Conservation, Agricultural Production, and Social Inclusion in the Cerrado Biome, suggests interventions that may contribute to the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services, social inclusion and support for traditional livelihoods, as well as regional growth in agricultural production.
The Climate and Land Use Alliance, a collaborative initiative of which the Moore Foundation is a member, commissioned the report. This report is accompanied by several supporting documents with extensive information on the Cerrado biome. To complement the findings of this report, reviews were solicited from issue experts. These reviews present a diversity of perspectives on priorities in the Cerrado and pose a number of fundamental questions about how to approach interventions in the region.
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