Since the mid-1970s, the tropical savanna, known as Cerrado, has been transformed into one of the world's largest grain-growing regions. This book explores how and by what Brazil achieved inclusive and sustainable growth in the Cerrado.

Since the mid-1970s, the tropical savanna, known as Cerrado, has been transformed into one of the world's largest grain-growing regions. This book explores how and by what Brazil achieved inclusive and sustainable growth in the Cerrado.

This study forms part of a greater project, New South–South Development Trends and African Forest, carried out in Gabon, Mozambique and Cameroon. In Mozambique, the project focused on the Brazilian– Japanese–Mozambican trilateral program ProSavana. At the time the study began, there was little information or previous work on the topic. This paper should therefore be treated as a scoping study. During the course of this scoping study, only a few papers based on field research were published, and the initial findings of this study are largely in line with this research. This paper supplements the existing literature by adding depth from field interviews in Nampula and Zambezia as well as an examination of the draft ProSavana reports, which became available in May 2013. This paper finds large misconceptions about what the ProSavana program is and what agrarian models will be implemented under the program. The ProSavana program team’s inadequacy in effectively communicating the program’s mission, methods and content has led civil society to look to PROCEDER for clues as to how ProSavana will play out in Mozambique. However, the findings from field visits, interviews with a range of stakeholders and a review of ProSavana project documents reported in this paper are that ProSavana will not be a replica of PROCEDER and the strategies proposed do align well with Mozambique’s agrarian strategy, known as PEDSA, and by extension the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). ProSavana must therefore be evaluated on its own merit.

This book is unique and original, constituting a pioneering study in the use of spatial economics and related analytical approaches to Brazil’s Cerrado agricultural development and the formation of agro-industrial value chains. This methodology is appropriate because Cerrado agriculture has been developed from scratch in a vast, previously barren area (204.7 million ha.) in which a spatial transformation has taken place. Until 40 years ago, this region, with its huge expanse of tropical savanna was believed to be unsuited to agriculture. Now, however, it has been transformed into an immense breadbasket, contributing to the mitigation of global food shortages. It also has contributed to the inland development of Brazil, promoting urbanization with a higher living standard and modern production techniques. This book identifies critical factors that enabled the transformation of the Cerrado. To understand the process of agricultural development and the formation of agro-industrial value chains, spatial economics and related approaches are essential because the process involves spatial interactions such as transportation, supply chains, knowledge spillovers, environmental constraints, migration, and urbanization. The book demonstrates that the initial development of Cerrado agriculture was a genuine spatial transformation with contributions from pioneering producers, agribusinesses, and central and local governments, as well as through international cooperation. It also discusses agriculture and agro-industrial value chains focusing on inclusive and sustainable development, a major concern of the international community particularly in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals.

This is an open access book. Relations between Brazil and Japan progressed dynamically in the 1960s and 1970s, centering on the substantial complementarity between Japan’s needing primary goods to sustain high economic growth and Brazil’s seeking non-hegemonic investment to invigorate its resource potential. Now that this complementarity has lost significance, the two countries are restructuring their relations to protect shared values of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and the need for maintaining good relations with both China and the United States. Analyzed here is the development of this renewed bilateral relationship in multiple directions: productivity, global environment and health, migration, and triangular cooperation in third countries’ development. Facing the prospect of a declining population, Japan may become more open to international migration, but the experience with Japanese-descent Brazilian workers since the amendment of the migration control law in 1990 presents many lessons and challenges for the symbiosis of multicultural groups. Brazil, for its part, needs to address social inequality. To this end, it is fundamental to improve the quality of work. This book argues that Brazil and Japan can benefit from cooperation in managing those country-specific issues. It also discusses ways that Brazil and Japan can profit from coordinating action on global problems such as greenhouse gas reduction, mitigation of tropical diseases, healthy community building, and high-quality infrastructure for poverty reduction.