What drives indirect land use change? How Brazil’s agriculture sector influences frontier deforestation
Open accessAbstract
From 2000-2005 high returns to soybeans set off an unprecedented expansion of agricultural production across Brazil. The expansion occurred concurrently to a sharp rise in deforestation, leading academics and policy makers to question the extent and means by which the growing agricultural sector was driving regional forest loss. In this article we consider and question the underlying drivers of indirect land use change, namely the potential impact of soybean expansion on beef prices and of land use displacement, via migration. We then present field level results documenting the displacement process in northern Mato Grosso and western Pará States of the Amazon. Our results question the extent to which tropical Amazon deforestation is attributable to land use displacement; however, we argue that the agricultural sector may drive deforestation through other channels, namely through regional land markets.
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Land banking at the Amazonian frontier makes sense because soy growers often come in the wake of cattle ranching-if not always, often enough to fuel land price speculation.
“Land banking at the Amazonian frontier makes sense because soy growers often come in the wake of cattle ranchingif not always, often enough to fuel land price speculation (Richards, 2015).”
From Beyond the “supply chain” framing: Cattle ranching as a vanishing mediator of deforestation and dispossession in the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon (2026) · cites this paper as Richards, 2015
The Price Effect section reports pasture conversion to cropland, and the Field Interviews section records eight such conversions among interviewed purchasers. The discussion section links rising soybean returns to land-price speculation. But the paper does not establish that soy growers often follow cattle ranchers at the frontier, or that this particular sequence fuels the speculation; it also reports cropland expansion into forest. (LLM, conf=0.83)
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Cites
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Cited by
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Middle-range theories of land system change
Meyfroidt, P., Roy Chowdhury, R., de Bremond, A., Ellis, E. C., Erb, K.-H., Filatova, T., Garrett, R. D., Grove, J. M., Heinimann, A., Kuemmerle, T., et al. (2018) · Global Environmental Change · doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.08.006 · Cited by 604 · see citing works
Bastos Lima, M. G., & López, J. (2026) · World Development · doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2026.107532
- Authors
- Richards, P.
- Affiliations
- Brown University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Richards, Peter
- ORCID
- Richards, Peter
- Venue
- Annals of the Association of American Geographers
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2015-08-18
- Volume
- 105
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1026-1040
- ISSN
- 0004-5608 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8306
- PMC
- PMC4789281
- OpenAlex
- W2276182637
- Cited by
- 73
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 28 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 2
- FWCI
- 2.50
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Annals of the Association of American Geographers (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24HD041020)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › General Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Oil Palm Production and Sustainability
- Keywords
- indirect land use change, soybean expansion, agricultural expansion, beef prices, rural migration, Amazon deforestation, land market, Mato Grosso, Pará
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