Food security and forest cover in Caatinga
We found a nuanced scenario with both synergies (win-win and lose-lose) and trade-offs (win-lose and lose-win) between food security and forest cover occurring in nearly similar proportions in the Caatinga. The combination represented by the negative synergy (lose-lose) between forest cover and food security is thought to be the worst scenario where an increasing food insecurity can be worsened by loss of natural resources (Meyfroidt, 2018). Many of these municipalities are located in a northeastern-to southwestern axis which is experiencing an expansion of a commodity-driven economy (fruit plantation and soybean) that exerts a pressure of deforestation and concentrates wealth (Weinhold et al., 2013). Double positive scenarios where both forest cover and food security increases may represent development moments when poverty alleviation and politics for reducing inequality are decoupled from deforestation and must probably rely on services and industry rather than agricultural expansion, combined with forest protection policies (Liu et al., 2017). Municipalities that lost forest and gained food security are probably experiencing the initial phases of commodity-driven development when a rapid increase in socioeconomic indicators derive from the establishment of new agricultural frontiers as already shown for the Amazon deforestation frontier (Rodrigues et al., 2009). The other side of this tradeoff where municipalities present net gains of forest cover but food security decreases may represent the “bust” phase of commodity-driven economy when land abandonment occurs due to the displacement of agricultural frontiers to cheaper lands leaving behind a poor and unequal society (Barbier & Hochard, 2018). Both types of tradeoffs resemble the initial and final phases of “boom-and-bust” development, respectively (Barbier, 2020).