Agronomic or contentious land change? A longitudinal analysis from the Eastern Brazilian Amazon

Stephen P Aldrich,Eugenio Arima,Fernando Michelotti,Edna Castro,Robert T Walker,Cynthia S Simmons

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0227378

Abstract

Since 1984, nearly 1,000 people have been killed in the Brazilian Amazon due to land conflicts stemming from unequal distribution of land, land tenure insecurity, and lawlessness. During this same period, the region experienced almost complete deforestation (< 8% forest cover by 2010). Land conflict exacts a human toll, but it also affects agents' decisions about land use, the subject of this article. Using a property-level panel dataset covering the period of redemocratization in Brazil (1984) until the privatization of long-term leases in the Eastern Amazon (2010), we show that deforestation is affected by land conflict, particularly in cases of expropriation of property for agrarian reform settlement formation and when that conflict involves fatalities. Deforestation on agrarian reform settlements is much greater when soils are poor for agriculture and when the land has been the object of past conflict. Deforestation and conflict are episodic, and both agronomic drivers and contentious drivers of land change are active in the region. Ultimately, the outcome of these processes of contentious and agronomic land change is substantial deforestation, regardless of who was in possession and control of the land.

Highlights

Conflict over access to natural resources and land have emerged as important drivers of land change [1,2,3,4]
The results of our analysis mostly support each of our hypotheses, with deforestation being affected by certain types of conflict, deforestation being much greater on properties which were expropriated for agrarian reform settlements, and end-of-period deforestation significantly higher on properties with conflict and settlement formation
We address each hypothesis in turn, before turning to a discussion of what these results indicate for Contentious Land Change (CLC) and Land Change Science (LCS) more generally

Summary

Introduction

Conflict over access to natural resources and land have emerged as important drivers of land change [1,2,3,4]. Most of the region’s land cover in the mid-1970s was dominated by closed-canopy tropical forest, comprising a variety of valuable hardwoods including mahogany (swietenia macrophylla), rubber trees (hevea brasiliensis), and Brazil nut (bertholletia excelsa). Much of the region experienced land conflict through the later part of the 20th century, our analytical modeling resides in its northern reaches in the BNP, an area of more than 6,800 km located roughly between the Tocantins River and the Carajas mines (Fig 1). The BNP, much of it once covered by dense stands of Brazil Nut trees and dominated by nontimber forest extraction, reveals a notorious history of violent land conflict [2, 32, 47].

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Conclusion