Forest Clearing Among Farm Households in the Maya Biosphere Reserve*

Abstract

Central America's tropical forests have been felled more rapidly than those of any other world region during the latter half of the twentieth century. During this time, nearly half of Guatemala's forests were eliminated. Most of this deforestation has been concentrated in the northern department of Petén. The remaining forests in Petén are now mainly concentrated in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), the heart of the largest lowland tropical forest in Central America. The pace, magnitude, and geography of this trend is of critical importance to forest conservation and rural development efforts. This article examines socioeconomic, political, demographic, and ecological factors behind settler land use and forest clearing among 241 farm households in the Sierra de Lacandón National Park (SLNP), a core conservation zone of the MBR. Some of the factors positively related to forest clearing were household size, Q'eqchí Maya ethnicity, land owned in the previous residence, farm size, land title, and the cropping of velvet bean as a soil amendment. Education, off-farm employment, and farm distance to a road were negatively related to farm-level deforestation. *I would like to thank Thomas Whitmore and Richard Bilsborrow for their assistance in developing this project and my field assistants and collaborators at the Nature Conservancy in Guatemala for their assistance in developing this project. I am also grateful to the generous funding of the following organizations: The Mellon Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), The National Institutes of Health (NIH), The Rand Corporation, Institute for the Study of World Politics, and, lastly, the University of North Carolina Department of Biostatistics, Royster Society of Fellows, and Carolina Population Center.