Jennifer Blesh Assistant Professor, School of Natural Resources and Environment

1. Resilience of Smallholder Farms in the Brazilian Cerrado: An Interdisciplinary and Participatory Assessment Framework Jennifer Blesh Assistant Professor, School of Natural Resources and Environment University of Michigan 5 May 2014

2. Agrarian Reform in the Cerrado

3. Socioecological Research in MT

4. Food System Resilience • Capacity to produce and access nutritious food in the face of uncertainty, without diminishing other vital ecosystem services • Ecologists have asked: Resilience of what to what? Can we manage for resilience? • We are also asking: How? Resilience for whom? Who decides? • Participatory assessment of the resilience of food sovereignty practices • Resilience includes adaptive capacity, transformative potential and human agency

5. Food Sovereignty • Transnational agrarian social movement that emerged in mid-1990s (in response to inequity) • Calls for rights of farmers, fishers, and consumer-citizens to determine food and agricultural policy and practice, respecting cultural and productive diversity • Landless rural workers movement (MST)

6. The MST Promotes Agroecology • Food producing,biodiverse • Mixtures of perennials and annuals, including horticulture, agroforestry, rotational grazing, etc. • Low external input • Target diverse markets: local market development, social economy, emphasize social equity

7. Research Questions What does the MST’s ideal model (agroecology and food sovereignty) look like in practice? • How do agroecological practices emerge in the Cerrado, and how are they sustained? • To what effect?

8. Study Sites • Mato Grosso—42 MST-organized settlements, with a total of 4,254 families • Settlements sampled: Tangará da Serra and MirassolD’Oeste/Araputanga (ARPA)

9. Mixed-methods Assessment • focus groups (n = 6) • participant observation • in-person farmer survey (n=60) • qualitative interviews (n = 30) • farm families • networks that support family farming • analysis of soil samples (n = 52 fields): particulate OM, C, N, and P • quantification of indicators from sample and survey data

10. Indicators of Resilience

11. Descriptive Statistics: Farmer Survey

12. Marketing Strategies ARPA Tangará da Serra

13. Brazil: Fome Zero Programs • Agricultural Credit • New settlers, women, value-added and processing • School Lunch Program: PNAE • 30% must be procured from small-scale farmers • ~2000 municipalities are participating • Public Procurement: PAA • Guaranteed markets for small scale production • Donated to schools, hospitals, food banks

14. Agrobiodiversity and Soil P **

15. PAA Improves Several FS Indicators Soil P Agrobiodiversity Food self-sufficiency CS management HH income Milk production Technical assistance Political participation

16. PAA Participation: 2010-2012 Source: CONAB contracts, 2010-2012

17. Challenges: PAA • Labor for horticultural production • Lack of infrastructure/machinery • Distance from urban markets • Poor road and transportation conditions • Lack of internet/phone service • Lack of technical assistance • Prior agricultural experience not in horticulture or marketing • New to regional/ecological knowledge

18. Concluding Thoughts • Learn from existing innovation • Agroecological production for local markets, especially through government purchasing programs (PAA) • Multidimensional analysis • Identify successes, trade-offs, leverage points for food system transformation • Cerrado is a challenging setting for the MST’s efforts • Biophysical: climate change, dry season, soils • Social: Regional socio-technical infrastructure supports commodity production (markets, roads, infrastructure) • Knowledge systems and resources for agroecological production are weak in the Cerrado

19. Concluding Thoughts • Place-based resilience in Brazilian Cerrado: • Bottom up and top down • Pressure from agrarian movement intersecting with state policy change • Still missing infrastructure and knowledge “in the middle”

20. Thank You • Hannah Wittman • José Fernando Scaramuzza • Wendy Wolford • Laurie Drinkwater • Farmer participants • Field and lab assistants • NSF IRFP (Project #: 1064807)

21. Mato Grosso Crop Production (ha) Data from IGBE, 2013

22. Indicators and Scale *Optimum concentration of Mehlich-I extractable P ranged from 6 - 25 mg kg-1 based on textural analysis (citation)

23. Management Characteristics • Only seven of the sampled fields were in legume-based management

24. Food Self-Sufficiency Rice Milk Corn Fruit Beef Pork Eggs Pasta Beans Cassava Chicken Vegetables

25. Conceptual Model Global WTO, climate variation National/Regional Govn’t subsidies and programs; conservation policies Food Sovereignty Ecological Resilience State/Landscape soil quality, slope; infrastructure, roads Community/HH Land tenure, education, farm/field mgmt.

26. National PAA Trends 700,000,000 600,000,000 500,000,000 400,000,000 300,000,000 200,000,000 100,000,000 0

27. Brazil: Institutionalizing Food Sovereignty • The realization of the human right to adequate food and to food and nutritional security requires respect for sovereignty, that conferson countries the primacy of their decisions around the production and consumption of food. Law No. 11.346. September 15, 2006 • [through] promoting sustainable agro-ecological systems for producing and distributing food, that respect biodiversity and strengthen family agriculture, indigenous peoples, and traditional communities that ensure the consumption and access to adequate and healthy food, respecting the diversity of national food cultures . . . incorporating into State policy respect for food sovereignty and the human right to adequate food.Decree No. 7.272. August 25, 2010

28. Mato Grosso Crop Production (ha)

29. POM N: Indicator of soil fertility • Soil has OM pools with differing turnover times • Some pools are more responsive to management: potential to manage pools with year to decadal turnover for internal nutrient cycling capacity • POM is related to the mineralizable N pool • Size and density fractionation (Marriot and Wander, 2006) to separate free and occluded POM • fPOM: macro + 250 – 500 μm • oPOM: 53 – 250 μm

30. Density and Size Fractionation

31. Variability in Study Site Soils

32. Occluded POM and % Clay R2=0.26 p=0.001 y=221.4x + 7196

33. Increased N in organic matter