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Abstract
The agricultural sector has been an important driver for regional development
in Brazil and the Brazilian economy as a whole. In this sense, the use of indicators and
methods to identify the sources of growth of crop production in the Northeastern Cerrado
region can support the design of policies to manage the use and occupation of land in
agricultural areas, as well as guide investment in infrastructure, for example. From the
1990s onwards, a new agricultural frontier based on capital intense production systems is
being opened in Brazil, the territory known as Cerrado Nordestino. In this context, the aim
of this paper is to identify and analyze, based on the Shift-share Model, some of the sources
of growth in temporary crop production in Cerrado Nordestino from 1990 to 2012, which
are leading the occupation of the territory. The results were performed at the municipal scale, which allowed the spatial distribution of crops and the identification of the most dynamic areas. Soybean and
corn have driven the occupation of agricultural frontier.