Degradação ambiental e desenvolvimento rural no Brasil

Abstract

Faced with the worldwide concern about human intervention on the environment, environmental degradation is among the main themes investigated due to its environmental, social and economic damages. In Brazil, agriculture is considered one of the activities that most cause this wear and tear. The present dissertation is approached in two essays. The first, called “Environmental Degradation and Agriculture in Brazil”, had as main objective to measure the proportion of environmental degradation resulting from agriculture from the application of the General Agricultural Environmental Degradation Index (IGDAA) and, based on this, group the municipalities similar. The data comes from the Agricultural Census (2017) and applied the techniques of factor analysis and clusters. Four degradation factors were found, namely: potential for soil wear by mechanical and biochemical technologies and misinformation (F1), potential for soil wear, water and health due to non-preparation of land and pesticides (F2), potential for wear and tear of soil by irrigation and pest control (F3) and, potential for environmental damage by livestock activity (F4), explaining 72% of the total variance of the data. Brazil presented an average index of 0.29, indicating that more than a quarter of its territory faces degradation problems. The three groups showed that more than 50% of the municipalities fall into the medium (cluster 2) and high (cluster 3) IGDAA, allocated largely in the South and Southeast regions. The other regions had a higher concentration in cluster 1 (low potential for degradation). In particular, the distinction in the level of degradation reflects the agricultural modernization of the localities. The second essay, entitled “Environmental degradation and its relationship with rural development in Brazil”, proposed the analysis of the relationship between agricultural environmental degradation indicators and rural development through canonical correlation analysis. The data are from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE, 2017) and the National Household Sample Survey (Pnad, 2015). The results showed that there is a linear relationship between the two sets of variables and that four of the ten canonical correlations generated are necessary to describe it. Thus, rural development indicators are important to explain environmental degradation. The formation of canonical variables of environmental degradation was mainly influenced by the use of mechanization, fertilizers and correctives. In addition to these indicators, the highest correlations between the original and canonical variables occurred due to the use of pesticides, irrigation, control of diseases and parasites in animals. The influence of the explanatory variables (rural development) on the dimension of degradation had greater correlations linked to access todiversification and productive functionalities via the internet, to demographic pressure due to population growth and the value of production per area. The redundancy measure showed that 75.93% of the variance of the degradation set is explained by rural development. Therefore, based on the evidence found, it is concluded that becoming aware of the reality about environmental degradation due to agriculture and livestock, as well as its relationship with rural development, is a fundamental starting point for measures to mitigate its harmful effects.