Forests, Coca, and Conflict: Grass Frontier Dynamics and Deforestation in the Amazon-Andes

Liliana M Davalos,Eleonora Davalos,Dolors Armenteras,Clara Tucker,Jennifer Holmes

doi:10.31389/jied.87

Abstract

Population growth with weak economic development can promote tropical deforestation, but government infrastructure investment can also open new frontiers and thus increase deforestation. In the Andean region of South America, population growth has been a leading explanation for both deforestation and coca cultivation, but coca generates armed conflict and attracts counter-drug measures, obscuring the differences between population-driven and frontier-opening models of deforestation. Using a 15-year panel from Colombia, we model deforestation, coca cultivation, and conflict victims as interrelated responses with a suite of covariates encompassing land cover, land cover changes, population, population changes, counter-drug measures, and government infrastructure spending. Infrastructure spending suppresses coca, coca and eradication by aerial fumigation both increase conflict, and conflict promotes deforestation and is associated with depopulation. But the strongest predictor of deforestation is pasture growth, which covaries with coca. While these models show that infrastructure spending can help reduce coca, and coca’s influence on deforestation is indirect and mediated by conflict, the models also reveal the most important challenge to forest conservation is neither coca nor conflict, but an insatiable appetite for land that expresses itself through pasture growth.

Highlights

Tropical forests hold vast stores of carbon and the greatest biodiversity in the world, which makes their conservation essential to stabilize climate and prevent extinction (Myers et al 2000; Mitchard 2018)
We argue that the frontier model of deforestation better explains forest loss in Colombia and in particular its Amazon-Andes
The strongest associations were positive for municipality area, rcoca, and aerial fumigation

Summary

Introduction

Tropical forests hold vast stores of carbon and the greatest biodiversity in the world, which makes their conservation essential to stabilize climate and prevent extinction (Myers et al 2000; Mitchard 2018). The specifics of carbon dynamics in tropical forests are debated (Baccini et al 2017; Hansen et al 2019; Hubau et al 2020), agriculture, forestry, and other land use contribute ~23% of annual global emissions, mainly through deforestation (Arneth et al 2019). At the same time, maintaining ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and water cycling (Lovejoy & Nobre 2019; Staal et al 2020), and averting catastrophic biodiversity loss (Gomes et al 2019) requires curbing tropical deforestation. There is tension between forest conservation for local and Davalos et al: Forests, Coca, and Conflict global ecosystem services and economic development, and this makes discovering the factors influencing tropical forest transformation essential to avert global catastrophe

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Conclusion