Roughly one-fifth of Brazil’s Amazon has been cleared in the
last 50 years, as the country went from being a food importer to a global
farming powerhouse. In terms of corn, Brazil is now the world’s second largest
exporter, after the United States.
But that forest-clearing, which also included more than half
of the natural vegetation in the vast Cerrado savanna southeast of the Amazon,
has made the region warmer. That heat is associated with lower corn yields,
researchers reported in the science journal Nature Sustainability.
“The landscape is getting a lot hotter than it should be,”
said study co-author Stephanie Spera, an environmental scientist with the
University of Richmond. “We’re messing with the system so much that we actually
might not be able to continue to cultivate agriculture, specifically corn.”
The researchers linked the deforestation to a 5-10% drop in
corn yields across most of the west-central state of Mato Grosso, Brazil’s
largest grains producer.
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