Análise da soja no Piauí entre os anos de 1990 a 2024 e seus impactos na supressão florestal

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the expansion of the soybean agricultural frontier in the state of Piauí, highlighting the role of this crop in the reorganization of capitalist agriculture and in the incorporation of municipalities into land and agricultural commodity markets. This expansion has driven up deforestation rates, especially in the Cerrado biome. Accordingly, the study presents a spatiotemporal analysis of soybean cultivation in Piauí between 1990 and 2024, combining geoprocessing procedures in QGIS version 3.44, raster-to-vector conversion, area calculations and the production of maps and vegetation-suppression graphs, based on municipal agricultural production data from the Automatic Recovery System, from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, and MapBiomas, which are used to compare the expansion of planted areas vis-à-vis increasing deforestation in the Piauí Cerrado. The results show that soybean cultivation, initially concentrated in the southwestern mesoregion, expanded into the center-north and northern mesoregions, reaching around 1,078,323 hectares in 2024, distributed across 36 municipalities, which corresponds to 42.9% of the state’s agricultural area and coincides with a significant reduction in native vegetation cover. It is concluded that the conversion of extensive Cerrado areas into soybean monocultures reveals the unsustainable nature of opening new agricultural frontiers for agribusiness and the emergence of a socio-environmental crisis that threatens the future of the Piauí Cerrado and the rural communities connected to it.