Agriculture and Health: How Food Inflation, Sugarcane Burning, and Pesticide Exposure Can Impact Health? 

We will discuss an effort to contribute to the literature on the relationship between agriculture and health indicators. This includes two papers that I am leading and have initial versions of, as well as a third, still in its early stages, which will be led by Stela. 

• 1. The Earliest Inequality: Two-Parent Advantage, Food Inflation, and Birth Outcomes in the Brazilian Semiarid (com Carlos Eduardo Drumond (UESC) e Carlos Estevão Cardoso (Embrapa) (submitted version) (PI: Leonardo Cardoso)

     • Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of exposure to food inflation during pregnancy on birth outcomes and documents how these outcomes vary by family structure. We combine administrative records on seven million births in the Brazilian Semiarid between 2000 and 2023 with plausibly exogenous variation in local food inflation. Higher food inflation during the third trimester of pregnancy reduces birthweight by 3 to 8 grams for every 10-percentage-point increase in food prices. However, exposure during the first and second trimesters has no clear effect. Regarding family structure, conditional on mother’s age, education, race, child’s sex, municipality fixed effects, and year fixed effects, children born into two-parent households are 19 grams heavier at birth than those born to single mothers. The two-parent advantage is considerably larger among Black and younger mothers, reaching 25 grams, and rises further to 26 grams among Black mothers with low levels of education. We also found that higher maternal education reduces the two-parent advantage, while legal marriage strengthens it. Both the negative impact of third-trimester food inflation and the two-parent advantage remain robust across a wide range of specifications and sample restrictions, including the exclusion of the COVID-19 period.

• 2. Technical change and health: Evidence from the reduction of sugarcane burning in Brazil (com Liqing Li (Texas A&M),  Deyvid Leite (UFU), Daiana Wischral (Lacbio) and David Just (Cornell) (new version in July-2026) (PI: Leonardo Cardoso)

     • Abstract: São Paulo, the major sugarcane-producing state in Brazil, commands over a fifth of the world's sugarcane production. This paper examines how the transition from manual pre-harvest burning to mechanical harvesting affected public health across São Paulo municipalities. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation in municipal sugarcane land share, we find that greater exposure to the technical change reduced hospitalizations for respiratory and circulatory diseases. Most distinctively, we document improvements in infant health: pollution-linked congenital anomalies fall, and infant respiratory mortality -- the mortality outcome most sensitive to air quality -- is reduced. Adult mortality from respiratory and circulatory causes shows no effect, indicating that the pollution reductions are large enough to affect morbidity and infant health, but fall short of the threshold required to shift adult mortality. We directly confirm the smoke mechanism: mechanical harvesting reduced PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations exclusively during the harvest season. Robustness is established through a triple-difference exploiting wind direction, a harvest-season triple-difference, a trauma hospitalization placebo, and a continuous treatment intensity specification.

• 3. Agricultural Pesticide Use and Child Health: No Evidence of a Tradeoff from Brazil (com Stela Januzzi (PPGEA/UFV) e Loredany Rodrigues (DER/UFV) (draft soon) (PI: Stela Januzzi)

     • Abstract: We examine the relationship between agricultural pesticide use and child health outcomes in Brazil using municipal-level panel models and individual birth records from a comprehensive national birth registry. Despite Brazil's status as one of the world's largest pesticide consumers and a period of rapidly expanding agrochemical use, we find no robust evidence of adverse effects on low birth weight, preterm birth, infant mortality, childhood cancer, congenital anomalies, or hypospadias. Apparent associations--including a positive coefficient on preterm birth among low-education mothers--disappear once maternal controls are included. These null results admit two interpretations: either population-level health damages from pesticide use are genuinely small at the municipal scale, or aggregate exposure measures lack the precision needed to detect heterogeneous, localized effects. Either way, the findings point to a binding data constraint and underscore the need for sub-municipal, crop-specific pesticide monitoring that does not yet exist at the national level in Brazil. We interpret the overall null as reflecting the detection limits of currently available data infrastructure rather than evidence of safety.