Abstract
Deforestation and global climate change are predicted to affect precipitation and agricultural productivity in the Amazon. Anecdotal evidence suggests that farmers are already being affected by changes in the timing and amount of precipitation, but there is little quantitative evidence on the mechanism by which precipitation affects production. This paper uses an innovative application of remote sensing and meteorological data to separate rainfall into green water (soil moisture that contributes to plant water use) and blue water (surface water), to estimate the impact of these water sources on the production and production efficiency of dairy in a mature colonization zone of the Brazilian Amazon. This approach allows us to draw inferences about different pathways through the precipitation-production causal chain and to link changes in precipitation with impacts on farm profits and welfare. We find that production and production efficiency are affected by green and blue water and that reductions in rainfall will have negative impacts that may disproportionally impact the poor. Our methods and results are informative to economists interested in this relatively new application of remote sensing data, to geographers interested in identifying the role of green and blue water in agricultural production, and more generally to researchers interested in the impacts of rainfall and water availability on small-scale producers in the Brazilian Amazon.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 105607 |
| Journal | World Development |
| Volume | 146 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2021 |
Funding
OPO was first settled in the late 1960s as a part of a series of legislative acts and decrees collectively known as Operation Amazonia ( Moran, 1981 ). These programs funded infrastructure such as roads and dams and settlements overseen by INCRA (the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform). Settlement plans included the establishment of urban centers every 30–40 km along federal highways and the allocation of properties around these centers to households migrating from other regions of Brazil ( Browder, 1994; Caviglia-Harris & Harris, 2011 ). Most settlements were laid out on regular grids with rectangular properties of 50 – 100HA along the roads. Settlers were awarded property rights that have been largely uncontested and secure. Migration increased in the 1980s after federal highway BR-364 was paved and financed by the World Bank via the Northwest Brazil Integrated Development Programme (POLONORESTE). Within the Amazon region, more than 1.2 million migrants were settled as part of these programs ( Pacheco, 2009 ). This work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1052875. The authors are thankful to representatives of the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment (Janaina de Almeida Rocha, Bernardo de Araujo Moraes Trovão, Antônio Calazans Miranda, Rejane Marques Mendes, José Ângelo Ramalho Leal, and Leonardo Julian Rodrigues Klosovski) and representatives from the Secretary of the Environment in Rondônia, Brazil (Arquimedes Ernesto Longo and Deise Nunes Furlan) for attending our workshops and providing input on our research questions and approaches; and to our other research collaborators from the SESYNC FAR project (Becky Dickson, Jasmine Fuller, Dar Roberts, Thaís Ottoni Santiago, Petterson Vale, Ricardo Vale, Thales West, and Yu Wu) for their support, curiosity and collegiality. In particular, we thank Petterson Vale for input that has strengthened our argument. The survey data used in this paper were funded by the National Science Foundation, under grant SES-0752936. We would like to thank our survey team: Rafael Alves da Silva, Anderson Boina, Alexsandro de Oliveira, Laize Sampaio Chagas e Silva, Maria Eliza Cota e Souza, Luzia Correa Dias, Liege Gehm, Juliana Gragnani, Julia Faro, Tânia Cloilde R. Luz, Ivone Holz Seidel, and Priscilla Souza for their tireless efforts to complete the household surveys as well as the local residents of Ouro Preto do Oeste for their participation. Previous rounds of data collection were supported by the National Science Foundation, SES-0452852 in 2005, SES-0076549 in 2000, and the National Security Education Program, the Organization of American States, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the McClure Fund Foundation in 1996. The household survey data used in the analysis can be found at the archive of social science data for research and instruction at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research of the University of Michigan. All location identifiers have been removed. The hydrology data can be found at the public online sources referenced in this paper.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| SES-0752936, SES-0076549, SES-0452852, DBI-1052875 | |
| Organization of American States | |
Keywords
- Brazilian Amazon
- Climate change and poverty
- Farmer production
- Green and blue water
- Remote sensing data
- Water and agriculture
