Comportamiento crítico autoorganizado de la superficie agrícola siniestrada: su uso en la definición de riesgo agroclimático

This paper describes a long term risk index for agricultural disasters. The index is built upon the principle that agricultural disasters follow a self organized critical behavior, which implies that under a wide variety of circumstances, agricultural disasters exhibit a power-law dependence of occurrence frequency on the affected area over many orders of magnitude. The paper describes the principle of a self organized critical behavior and how it has been observed in many extreme climatic events as well as the density and distribution of diseases and plagues linked to agriculture and other human activities. With this background a hypothesis that agricultural disasters follow a self organized critical behavior whose order of magnitude approximate those reported for extreme climatic events is stated. An empirical proof showing the frequency-size distribution of agricultural disasters follows a critical organized critical behavior is offered. The test uses the difference between cropped and harvested area under cyclic crops reported by SIAP for the period 1980-1994 as a proxy data to estimate the damaged area. Based on this relationship a long term risk indexes for agricultural disasters is generated per state and harvest season. Some applications of the index are discussed as well as its relationship with the agricultural insurance subsidy spending.