Abstract
Forest conversion for agriculture is the most expansive signature of human occupation on the Earth’s surface. This paper develops a conceptual model of factors underlying frontier agricultural expansion—the predominant driver of deforestation worldwide—from the perspective of small farm households—the majority of farmers globally. The framework consists of four causal rubrics: demographic, socioeconomic, political–economic, and ecological. Following this approach, the article explores the current state of knowledge on tropical deforestation in tropical agricultural frontiers with a focus on Latin America, the region of greatest deforestation worldwide during recent decades. Neo-Malthusian arguments notwithstanding, in many tropical nations, deforestation has proceeded unabated in recent years despite declining rural populations. However, evidence from the global-to-household scale suggests that population size and composition are also related to farm forest conversion. Existing particularist or behaviorialist theories sometimes fail to capture key geographical and temporal dimensions, yet studies support the notion that certain cultural, individual, and household characteristics are crucial determinants of forest clearing. Conversely, while institutional arguments sometimes fail to emphasize that the ultimate land use change agents are local resource users, their livelihood decisions are shaped and constrained by policies governing economic subsidies, and market and infrastructure development. Further, although ecological change is usually modeled as an outcome in the deforestation literature, increasingly acute climate change and natural farm endowments form a dynamic tabula rasa on which household land use decisions are enabled. To more fully comprehend frontier forest conversion and to enhance protection and conservation while promoting vital local livelihoods, future research may fruitfully investigate the interaction of demographic, social, political, economic, and ecological factors across spatial scales and academic disciplines.
Highlights
Forest conversion for agriculture inscribes the most extensive signature of human activity on planet Earth
Understanding humanenvironment dynamics has increasingly been recognized as a research priority of the global environmental change community, yet what is known about tropical deforestation, despite hundreds of research articles across the social and physical sciences, remains limited by disjoined case studies at the micro scale, and by gross estimates of varying reliability relating forest cover to human drivers at the macro scale
This paper has reviewed some of the literature regarding demographic, economic, political, household, and ecological factors associated with deforestation along tropical agricultural frontiers
Summary
Forest conversion for agriculture inscribes the most extensive signature of human activity on planet Earth. While infrastructure expansion (e.g., urbanization and road building) represents a proximate cause of forest clearing in itself, recent models fail to emphasize that infrastructure development has a much greater role in tropical deforestation as a distal cause facilitating agricultural colonization, which leads to forest conversion. This paper attempts to separate household factors (e.g., microeconomic and behavioral variables) from structural (macro) economic or political–institutional (most of which, as noted with an asterisk, are measurable at the community level or greater) Following these modifications, the proximate causes of frontier forest conversion are framed as nested within four categories: demographic, political–economic, socioeconomic, and ecological (Figure 1). If rural populations are declining in most Latin American nations, how is population associated with frontier forest clearing? As I will discuss, in-migration, household size, household composition, and population density combine with economic and other factors to act in complex ways towards the retreat of frontier forests
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