Abstract
The Government of Madagascar is trying to reduce deforestation and conserve biodiversity through creating new protected areas in the eastern rainforests. While this has many benefits, forest use restriction may bring costs to farmers at the forest frontier. We explored this through a series of surveys in five sites around the Corridor Ankeniheny Zahamena new protected area and adjacent national parks. In phase one a stratified random sample of 603 households completed a household survey covering demographic and socio-economic characteristics, and a choice experiment to estimate the opportunity costs of conservation. A stratified sub-sample (n = 171) then completed a detailed agricultural survey (including recording inputs and outputs from 721 plots) and wild-harvested product survey. The data have been archived with ReShare (UK Data Service). Together these allow a deeper understanding of the household economy on the forest frontier in eastern Madagascar and their swidden agricultural system, the benefits households derive from the forests through wild-harvested products, and the costs of conservation restrictions to forest edge communities.
Highlights
Background & SummaryTropical forests provide vitally important ecosystem services and support valued biodiversity[1,2,3]
Forest conservation can result in real costs to forest frontier communities, many of whom are poor and marginalised, by preventing agricultural expansion and restricting access to valued wild-harvested products[6,7]
While forest-dependent people are difficult to define and to count[9], many millions of people living on the forest frontier in tropical countries make their living from small-scale swidden agriculture and harvesting products from the wild.[10,11]
Summary
Tropical forests provide vitally important ecosystem services and support valued biodiversity[1,2,3]. We collected information on demographic and basic socio-economic characteristics of the households, including land holdings, general information on the use of wildharvested products, whether the household had received compensation under the World Bank social safeguard scheme, assets and wealth indicators, and information on social and human capital Alongside these interviews we conducted a choice experiment, designed to estimate the opportunity cost of conservation restrictions which prevent households from clearing further agricultural land from forests.[20,21] The second phase collected much more detailed information on land use, agricultural practices, off-farm income and wild-harvested products with a stratified random sub-sample of 171 households across four sites. They will allow opportunity cost estimates using the household production function approach, in-depth analysis of forest dependency and the swidden agricultural system practiced in this area, including how crop production varies with the land use history of a plot
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