Closing the Yield Gap in Livestock Production in Brazil: New Results and Emissions Insights

In this paper we analyze the impacts of partially closing the livestock yield gap in Brazil, with a focus on the deforestation reduction and emissions, using a Computable General Equilibrium model of Brazil, the TERM-BR model, tailored for land use and emissions analyses. We use satellite imagery information generated by LAPIG (Images Processing and Geoprocessing Laboratory, University of Goias, Brasil) for year 2014, at municipal level (5,570 observations) to calculate the yield gap, using the Tukey method to identify measurement errors in the data. In our calculation, we selected the 10% most productive municipalities in Brazil in livestock production, to calculate the average productivity of this quantile, as an estimate of the attainable regional productivity. The yield gap is expressed as the difference between the average of the 10% quantile and the general average in each region. We further weight this measure by the share of land with high and very high suitability for pastures, by state. In GHG accounting, we introduce the accounting of carbon storage in soils. With that, we take into account three emissions effects in livestock intensification: a natural forest sparing effect, an emissions in the herd effect, and the carbon storage in soils effect. We do GHG emissions calculations in livestock through two alternative ways: by fixed coefficients in relation to livestock activity; and in an alternative way in which carbon storage in soils is included. Our results show that the increase in emissions associated to the growing herd size would outnumber the emissions reduction generated by the forest sparing effect, if carbon storage in soils were not accounted. We conclude that this third effect is very important to avoid the wrong message when analyzing climate policies aiming livestock intensification.