ABSTRACT
At the time of writing, more than 50% of the 2,000,000 km2 of the cerrado savanna has been transformed into pastureland, cash crops, and other types of land use. Pastureland cultivated with African grasses now covers 500,000 km2, an area the size of Spain. Crops occupy another 100,000 km2, 63% with soybeans alone (Klink and Machado 2005; Sparovek et al. 2010). Today the cerrado is responsible for more than half of Brazil’s soybean and beef production, most of it for export. The perception of abundant land has fostered land-use change in the cerrado. Modern technology has exacerbated social inequality since it demands less labor (Mueller 2005; Mueller and Martine 1997) and there has been major environmental modification (Carvalho et al. 2009; Davidson et al. 2012; Klink and Machado 2005): landscape fragmentation, loss of biodiversity, biological invasion, soil erosion, water pollution, land degradation, heavy use of chemicals, imbalances in the carbon cycle, and regional climate modification.
