Mudanças no uso e ocupação do solo e suas implicações para a cadeia produtiva do Babaçu (Attalea speciosa) na região dos Cocais, Estado do Maranhão, Brasil

Abstract

The use of non) IN THE COCAIS timber forest products by man has been around since the beginning of time, and these products represent an important source of energy, nutrition, and income for many traditional communities. For many families in the state of Maranhão, babassu represents the "Palm of Life", because everything is taken from it. This exploitation, when done without the proper management of these resources, brings damage to the environment. The objective of this work is to understa nd the productive chain of the babassu coconut, the agents involved, the products and byproducts, as well as the analysis of land use and land cover, and how this impacts this chain. To do so, a preestablished historical series was used for four municipal in the coconut zone of Maranhão ities Codó, Coroatá, Timbiras and Caxias. For land use and occupation, MapBiomas data from the years 1987, 2003, and 2019 were used, thus allowing the temporal evolution of that region to be evaluated. For the data regardi ng the production and vegetal extraction, products, byproducts, and how the babassu production chain works, a documentary and bibliographic research was used, as well as the extraction of secondary data from official sources. The results of this work indic ate that there has been a significant evolution in the pasture and agriculture classes in the region, in addition, there has been a decrease in native vegetation formations, resulting mainly from the evolution of the previous classes. Besides a large drop in the production of babassu nuts in the municipalities studied, which shows the crisis in this nontimber forest product. Thus, we conclude how the transformations occur in the territories of this region and how this can impact the babassu production.