Land tenure and agricultural expansion in Latin America: The role of Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ forest rights

Abstract

Agricultural expansion remains the most important proximate cause of tropical deforestation, while interactions between socio-economic, technological and institutional factors represent the fundamental drivers. Projected population increases could further raise the pressure on the remaining forests, unless agricultural intensification allows raising agricultural output without expanding agricultural areas. The purpose of this article is to understand the role of institutional factors in governing the intensification process towards the goal of preserving forests from agricultural pressures, with a focus on Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights to forests (as embedded in the various tenure regimes). In this paper we adopt an international dimension and analyse the process of agricultural expansion across eleven Latin American countries over the period 1990–2010 to assess whether, in a context of agricultural intensification, different land tenure regimes impact differently on the realization of land-sparing or Jevons paradox. The results, based on a number of multivariate statistical models that controls for socio-economic factors, strongly suggest that the formal recognition of Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ forest rights has played an important role in promoting land sparing or attenuating Jevons paradox.