Forest Frontier Research Articles

Violent enclosures, violated livelihoods: environmental and military territoriality in a Philippine frontier

The political geography of environmental governance can overlap and converge with uneven agrarian change in forest frontiers subject to violent enclosures. When the governance of conservation territories converges with and reinforces enclosures, spaces can be controlled with authority and violence that places livelihoods at greater risk in the context of uneven agrarian political economies – the outcomes of which reflect ‘violent enclosures’. This paper examines how indigenous resource users negotiate the discursive and material impact of environmental governance converging with militarized-insurgent spaces as overlapping enclosures in a protected area on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Drawing on local experiences, we examine how the livelihood vulnerability arising in the local political economy is exacerbated by access and use constraints from the overlapping enclosures of environmental and military governance in the buffer zone of Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. We argue that the seemingly less governable forest frontiers of protected areas are often the poorest, highly politicized and contested spaces of political and ecological refuge. Here, scarce forest resources are managed closely, and recalcitrant groups seek refuge as military powers frame, conflate and manage local behaviour as criminal and dangerous, merging conservation and military interventions as coercive governance. We conclude that only by critically engaging how governance processes and enclosures converge to yield structural and discursive violence – and by making this apparent to policy makers – will indigenous peoples successfully negotiate the double bind of violent enclosures in frontiers.

The Expanding Techniques of Progress: Agricultural Biotechnology and UN-REDD+

This paper provides a comparative analysis of agricultural biotechnology and the United Nations program for reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). Despite the existing differences between the technical manipulation of biological systems and a conservation program aimed at reducing carbon and protecting forests, the two share commonalities in ideological origin, application, and values. Presented as positive developments, both seek to address large-scale issues such as global hunger and climate change, but while receiving national and international support they remain controversial issues. Both issues are critically assessed, beginning with a brief history, followed by the application of William Dugger's four invaluation processes: contamination, subordination, emulation, and mystification. This approach unravels the subtle social power of state and market forces that seek to control genetic material and forest frontiers as new outlets for growth and investment.

Climate change, cocoa migrations and deforestation in West Africa: What does the past tell us about the future?

Cocoa farming has been a major driver of deforestation in West Africa, notably in Cote d’Ivoire, the world’s leading cocoa producer. Cocoa has been a “pioneer crop” that was grown after forest clearing, and instead of replanting aging plantations, farmers usually migrated to the forest frontiers to establish a new cocoa farm. During the second half of the twentieth century, the cocoa frontier moved from the drier east to the wetter southwest of the country, fueled by massive immigration of prospective cocoa farmers from the savanna. It has been argued that the climate gradient was a major driver of these east–west migrations and that cocoa farmers, by replacing forest with farm land over vast areas, contributed to the further drying of the climate in a positive feedback cycle. If this were the case, then a hotter and drier future climate would likely continue to push cocoa farmers into the wetter southwest of the sub-continent, with the last forest reserves of southwestern Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia as the only remaining destinations. Based on an analysis of long-term rainfall measurements in major cocoa growing areas of Cote d’Ivoire and interviews with cocoa farmers about their history and motives of migration, we argue that climate and drought have been supporting factors, but not usually the main drivers of cocoa migrations, which were mostly a response to the perceived availability of forest land for planting. We also show that the observed decrease in rainfall in the cocoa regions during the 1970s and 1980s was not primarily a response to local deforestation related to cocoa farming, although deforestation may have caused microclimatic changes. Climate extremes like the 1982/3 drought have also triggered adaptations of farming practices like replanting and crop diversification. To prevent cocoa farming from continuing to act as a driver of deforestation in a hotter climate, governments and supply chain actors should discourage forest frontier dynamics and should help cocoa farmers adapt to environmental change by adopting more intensive and diversified farming practices, building on farmers’ own risk mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Financing Sustainable Forest Landscapes

Tropical deforestation is one of the defining issues of our time. Addressing it will require local solutions to a global problem that must be implemented within a narrow and closing window of time. This is no easy task and will require strong leadership and “joined-up” policy making. Addressing tropical deforestation will also require vast pools of capital, and much of it will need to come from the private sector. The good news is that this capital already exists at an enormous scale—an estimated US$225 trillion dollars of private capital is currently allocated through the world's financial markets. As a career banker, I have observed that the “financial economy” often facilitates much that takes place on the surface of the earth. While I am not rash enough to suggest that finance is the perfect solution that will enable sustainable forest landscapes, I strongly believe that the financial sector has a very important role to play in global forest conservation. One of the most promising mechanisms for channeling private capital to green economic growth more broadly—and to forest conservation more specifically—is Green Bonds. This belief was reinforced by a recent conversation with senior management of one of the world's largest Sovereign Wealth Funds who shared my excitement of the potential of these products. Although bonds themselves aren't new (they were used over 800 years ago in Renaissance Italy, for example), Green Bonds are a relatively recent innovation. Unprecedented interest from the world's largest investors is driving the transition from niche to mainstream at extraordinary pace. Bonds are simply an effective mechanism to borrow money, and are labelled “green” when the proceeds are dedicated to a specific set of “green activities.” In the context of forests, these activities will most likely have to address development far beyond the forest frontier, in sectors such as the agricultural, urban, transport and energy systems that can all impact the forests. Green bonds are essentially a mechanism for preferencing a holistic approach to “forest friendly” sustainable productive investments over alternative growth strategies in forest economies Green Bonds capitalize on a growing appetite for “purpose-driven” finance and are attractive to the financial sector for many reasons; they are a familiar product to the investment community and they represent the single largest pool of capital in the world. Importantly, they help reduce the risk and complexity of greener investing. They make product selection simple and standardized for investors and they outsource the social and environmental due diligence to credible third parties. From a policy perspective, they have the potential to create a virtuous cycle: uncovering the large-scale investor appetite we are seeing in the market will help to drive governments to develop forest friendly green growth frameworks in the knowledge that cheap private sector capital is eager and available. Investment requires clear indicators and measures of performance, and this is extremely relevant to complex topics like sustainable forest landscapes. We need to be clear about what we are trying to achieve and rigorous about how we measure it. We need to assist the financial sector by simplifying and standardizing. For that we need credible standards, and then third party verification of those standards. There is huge demand from the finance community for this. For the conservation community, this means rising to the challenge of producing clear yet comprehensive indicators and measures related to sustainable forest landscapes that large, responsible money managers can trust and use. The challenges related to sustainable forest landscapes are significant, but so are the opportunities. Engaging the financial sector and mobilizing private capital on a large scale is one of these opportunities. This will be no easy task, but working on the three areas above will we a considerable step in the right direction to realising the vision laid out by John Sawhill, the former President and CEO of TNC, who observed, “in the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.”

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

This article investigates how land users perceive laws restricting deforestation and forest degradation, notably Brazil’s National Forest Code, and how legal meaning emerges as place specific to influence their legal compliance. Interviews were held with land users in Acre state, a municipality with high rates of deforestation located in the forest frontier of the Brazilian Amazon. Critical legal geography was applied as a theoretical framework to investigate the ways in which legal meaning emerges in and through that social context. This research finds that non-compliance is associated with pervasive conditions of social stress combined with lived experiences of contradictory legal processes, including shifting legal discourses and inconsistent local law enforcement. In such social contexts, local legal meaning associates forest conservation laws with socio-economic and legal inequality and the reinforcement of structures of social exclusion.

Policy change, land use, and agriculture: The case of soy production and cattle ranching in Brazil, 2001–2012

The Brazilian Amazon has experienced one of the world's highest deforestation rates in the last decades. Cattle ranching and soy expansion constitute the major drivers of deforestation, both through direct conversion and indirectly by land use displacement. However, deforestation rates decreased significantly after the implementation of the action plan to prevent and control deforestation in 2004. The aim of this study is to quantify the contribution of cattle and soy production with deforestation before and after the implementation of the action plan in the two states Mato Grosso and Pará along the BR-163. Specifically, we aim to empirically test for land use displacement processes from soy expansion in Mato Grosso to the deforestation frontier between 2001 and 2012. First, we calculated the relationships between deforestation rate and the change in cattle head and planted soy area respectively for the BR-163 region. Second, we estimated different panel regression models to test the association between processes of land use displacement. Our results indicate a close linkage between cattle ranching and deforestation along the BR-163 between 2001 and 2004. Soy expansion in Mato Grosso was significantly associated with deforestation during this period. However, these relations have diminished after the implementation of the action plan to control and prevent deforestation. With the decrease in deforestation rates in 2005, cattle ranching and deforestation were not directly linked, nor was soy expansion in Mato Grosso and deforestation at the forest frontier. Our analysis hence suggests that there was a close coupling of processes and spatial displacement until 2004 and a decoupling has taken place following the political interventions. These findings improve the understanding of land use displacement processes in Brazil and the methods offer potential for exploring similar processes in different regions of the world.

Benefits and costs of deforestation by smallholders: Implications for forest conservation and climate policy

Deforestation is a leading cause of biodiversity loss and an important source of global carbon emissions. This means that there are important synergies between climate policy and conservation policy. The highest rates of deforestation occur in tropical countries, where much of the land at the forest frontier is managed informally by smallholders and where governance systems tend to be weak. These features must be considered when designing policies to reduce emissions from deforestation such as REDD+. Deforestation is often accompanied by fires that release large amounts of carbon dioxide. These emissions are especially high in the case of peatlands which contain thick layers of carbon-rich matter. In this paper we derive marginal abatement cost (MAC) curves using data from a farmer survey in Sumatra, where rates of peatland deforestation are high. Comparing these results with farmers' stated willingness to accept payment not to clear forest to establish oil palm suggests that REDD+ policies may be more expensive than MAC estimates suggest The extent to which this is true depends on the types of soils being deforested.

What Drives Deforestation and What Stops it? A Meta-Analysis of Spatially Explicit Econometric Studies

We have constructed a comprehensive database of 117 spatially explicit econometric studies of deforestation published in peer-reviewed academic journals from 1996-2013. We present a metaanalysis of what drives deforestation and what stops it, based on the signs and significance of 5909 coefficients in 554 multivariate analyses. We find that forests are more likely to be cleared where economic returns to agriculture and pasture are higher, either due to more favorable climatological and topographic conditions, or due to lower costs of clearing forest and transporting products to market. Timber activity, land tenure security, and community demographics do not show a consistent association with either higher or lower deforestation. Population is consistently associated with greater deforestation, and poverty is consistently associated with lower deforestation, but in both cases endogeneity makes a causal link difficult to infer. Promising approaches for stopping deforestation include reducing the intrusion of road networks into remote forested areas; targeting protected areas to regions where forests face higher threat; tying rural income support to the maintenance of forest resources through payments for ecosystem services; and insulating the forest frontier from the price effects of demand for agricultural commodities.

Assessing the influence of land-cover change and conflicting land-use authorizations on ecosystem conversion on the forest frontier of Madre de Dios, Peru

Despite the many benefits natural forests provide, they are being lost worldwide at unsustainable rates as development frontiers expand. One approach to improving the efficacy of natural forest conservation efforts is to refine local forest conservation policies based on insights from the place-based study of conservation policies and land-use and land-cover change (LULC) dynamics. To demonstrate the strength of this approach, this research explores the dynamics of LULC and conservation policies on the forest frontier of Madre de Dios, Peru. The main objectives of this research are to evaluate the efficacy of designated conservation lands in a rapidly expanding frontier landscape and to assess the effect on ecosystem conversion of granting conflicting land-use designations, such as mining concessions, inside conservation areas. Using statistical matching and a GIS-based analysis of LULC, this research shows that for the period 2006–2011, designated conservation lands on the forest frontier of Madre de Dios significantly reduced ecosystem losses compared to non-conservation lands, but the effect was highly variable across conservation designations. Also, when present, conflicting land-use authorizations inside conservation areas, specifically overlapping mining and agricultural titles, eliminated the policy additionality of designating lands for conservation. This finding demonstrates that authorizing conflicting land-use rights inside conservation areas should be avoided to ensure intended land conservation outcomes. This case study also provides examples of how local forest conservation policies can be improved through detailed and frequent analyses of LULC and conservation policies, particularly in dynamic frontier landscapes where LULC and socio-economic conditions are rapidly changing.

Demand for beef is unrelated to pasture expansion in northwestern Amazonia

For decades, pastures have replaced Amazon forests, threatening biodiversity. Two dominant hypotheses explain this process. First, according to the hamburger connection beef markets promote conversion of forests into cattle ranches resulting in deforestation. Second, the land-as-wealth hypothesis explains deforestation as the result of land appreciation in forest frontiers. We tested these hypotheses using land use and socioeconomic data from northwestern Amazonia from 2000 to 2009. We also investigated two key control variables: coca cultivation and eradication, both of which have been proposed as important drivers of forest loss. We found high rate of conversion from forest to pasture, and unimpeded forest fragmentation. As predicted by the hamburger connection, pastures expanded as the cattle inventory grew. Beef demand did not drive pasture expansion, as ranching revenues declined and beef prices were roughly stable. Coca cultivation did not respond to the eradication campaign, and declined as the population became increasingly urbanized. We propose that investment on roads has enhanced the anticipated value of land. Cattle bolster land claims and can be used as financial collateral, so they have inherent value even without market exchange. Cattle can then increase despite stable beef prices and declining ranching revenues. To protect biodiversity, policy interventions that enhance the value of standing forests are needed to slow deforestation and fragmentation in these rapidly changing landscapes.

Shifting rights, property and authority in the forest frontier: ‘stakes’ for local land users and citizens

Customary land and forests are more embedded in the global economy than ever. With globally significant supplies of land and raw materials and favorable terms for foreign investors, developing countries – particularly in Africa – have become increasingly attractive trade partners and destinations for investors. Increasing competition over land is placing new pressures on vast tracts of forest and woodland, areas often considered ‘under-utilized’ by national governments despite their critical role in supporting local livelihoods. While increased demand for primary agricultural, forest and mining commodities in the context of forest tenure reforms and decentralized decision-making could create unprecedented economic opportunities for forest-dependent communities, increased ‘stakes’ over forest resources and land will undoubtedly heighten governance challenges. This is in no small part due to the political dynamics of property, and to the role of the ‘recursive constitution of property rights and authority’ in the evolution of the modern nation-state. By identifying the social ‘stakes’ associated with different pathways through which sectoral and extra-sectoral commodities shape forests, this paper provides a conceptual framework for analyzing how shifting contours of rights, property and authority in the context of forest-related trade and investment shape human well-being for affected communities and the wider citizenry of host countries. It then illustrates the use of the framework through its application to two brief case studies from southern Africa: tobacco production in Malawi and copper mining in Zambia. It is hoped that this framework will provide a meaningful contribution to growing scholarship on the political dynamics of property, and implications for rights-based approaches to agricultural investment and large-scale land acquisitions.

Farmers' (local and colonists) perceptions of environmental changes in the forest frontier of the upper Amazon, Peru

Amazon ecosystem degradation profoundly impacts life supporting processes of global importance such as climate regulation, as well as local conditions for livelihoods. In Peru’s highland jungle, an expanding deforestation front of forest conversion to agriculture has vastly transformed the landscape. Small-scale farming, the main driver of forest degradation, and consequently household natural resource management affect ecosystem functionality. To investigate farmers’ attitudes and priorities to services provided by the ecosystems (ES) we interviewed 51 farmers, both local and colonists. They strongly agreed that over the last three decades, local conditions for livelihoods have deteriorated following forest degradation and climate change. The latter was reported the primary contributor to an impaired life quality and their greatest concern. Overall, local farmers perceived greater environmental change than did colonists who were also more positive towards intensive agriculture and forestry. This should be considered in environmental conservation efforts in the upper Amazon.

The politics of the forest frontier: Negotiating between conservation, development, and indigenous rights in Cross River State, Nigeria

Nigeria's once thriving plantation economy has suffered under decades of state neglect and political and civil turmoil. Since Nigeria's return to civilian rule in 1999, in a bid to modernize its ailing agricultural economy, most of its defunct plantations were privatized and large new areas of land were allocated to ‘high-capacity’ agricultural investors. This paper explores the local tensions associated with this policy shift in Cross River State, which, due to its favorable agro-ecological conditions and investment climate, has become one of Nigeria's premier agricultural investment destinations. It shows how the state's increasing reliance on the private sector as an impetus for rural transformation is, paradoxically, crowding out smallholder production systems and creating new avenues for rent capture by political and customary elites. Moreover, as Nigeria's most biodiverse and forested state, the rapid expansion of the agricultural frontier into forest buffer zones is threatening to undermine many of the state's conservation initiatives and valuable common pool resources. The paper goes on to explain why and how private sector interests in Cross River State are increasingly being prioritized over natural resource protection, indigenous rights over the commons, and smallholder production systems.

“Slash and Burn” and “Shifting” Cultivation Systems in Forest Agriculture Frontiers from the Brazilian Amazon

We analyze changes in the extent of slash and burn cultivation (SBC) and shifting cultivation (SC) and the main drivers of change observed in the last 10 years across the Brazilian Amazon. Our results show that SC is stable in indigenous and caboclo communities from Amazonas and Acre. SBC increases along new roads, illustrating how roads shape deforestation frontiers beyond the “arc of deforestation.” In established forest frontiers, the conversion of forests into pasture or cash crops through SBC continues to increase locally, but smallholders' diversification strategies translate into complex land uses with both the increase and decrease of SBC and SC observed locally. Secure land tenure, access to markets, and population increase appear to be driving to the classic intensification path. Overall, access to cash transfer programs has helped stabilize forest frontiers as households become less reliant on subsistence agricultural production.

Quantifying successional land cover after clearing of tropical rainforest along forest frontiers in the Congo Basin

State-of-the-art impact-modeling studies in environmental and climatological sciences require detailed future deforestation scenarios that allow forest to be replaced by a mosaic of multiple successional land-cover types, rather than the simple conversion of forest to a single land-cover type, such as bare soil or cropland. Therefore, not only the amount and location of forest removal has to be known (as is typically provided by scenarios), but also knowledge about the successional land-cover types and their relative areal proportions is needed. The main objective of this study was to identify these successional land-cover types and quantify their areal proportions in regions deforested during the past 37 years around the city of Kisangani, D.R. Congo. The fallow vegetation continuum was categorized in different stages, adapted from existing classifications. Ground-truth points describing the present-day vegetation were obtained during a field campaign and used for supervised and validated land-cover classification of these categories, using the Landsat image of 2012. Areal proportions of successional land-cover types were then derived from the resulting land-cover map. The second objective of this study was to relate these areal proportions to time since deforestation, which is expected to influence fallow landscapes. Landsat images of 1975, 1990, and 2001 were analyzed. Present-day mature tree fallow is less abundant on areas deforested during 1975–1990. The relative areal proportions were used to refine a deforestation scenario and apply it to existing data-sets of LAI and canopy height (CH). Assuming a simple conversion of forest to cropland, the deforestation scenario projected a reduction of grid-cell-averaged CH from 25.5 to 7.5 m (within deforested cells), whereas the refined scenarios that we propose show more subtle changes, with a reduced CH of 13 m. This illustrates the importance of taking successional land cover correctly into account in environmental and climatological modeling studies.

Implications of uncertainty and scale in carbon emission estimates on locally appropriate designs to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+)

This study combined uncertainty analysis of carbon emissions with local stakeholders' perspectives to develop an effective Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) scheme at the district level. Uncertainty of carbon emission estimates depends on scale while local stakeholders' views on plausible REDD+ schemes influence and limit transaction costs. The uncertainty analysis formed the basis for determining an appropriate scale for monitoring carbon emission estimates as performance measures for REDD+ incentives. Our analysis of stakeholder’ perspectives explored (i) potential location and activities for lower emission development pathways, and (ii) perceived fair allocation of REDD+incentives. Our case study focused on frontier forest in Tanjung Jabung Barat District, Jambi, Indonesia. The uncertainty analysis used Monte Carlo simulation techniques using known inaccuracy of land cover classification and variation in carbon stocks assessment per land cover type. With decreasing spatial resolution of carbon emission maps, uncertainty in carbon estimates decreased. At 1 km2 resolution uncertainty dropped below 5 %, retaining most of the coarser spatial variation in the district. Fairness, efficiency and transaction cost issues in the design of REDD+ mechanisms were readily recognized by local stakeholders, who converged on an equal allocation to short-term efficiency (emission reduction activities) and long-term fairness (alternative livelihood development). A striking difference occurred in desirable transaction costs (which include monitoring, reporting and verification), with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) aiming for 8 %, while government and researchers accepted transaction costs of 40 %. Feasible measures for emission reduction in the district, derived from a participatory planning process, are compatible with the 1 km2 spatial resolution of performance measures.

Investigation of forest area and density changes in Lorestan province using aerial photos interpretation and GIS in the past half century (A case study: Kakareza region, Lorestan province)

This study located in the Oak trees coppice of kuckureza situated on 45 th kilometers on the way to Aleshtar from northeast of Khorramabad at the middle area of zugross. In this study cognitional changes (area and accumulation) of these forests is studied via pictures taken from the air in (1:55000) and in 1376 (1:40000). For this purpose, geometric corrections are done as the movement correction issued from ups and downs on the pictures taken in the air is performed, then the forest frontier localities are fixed through sight inter pretation and thickness layers of canopy was appointed in a dotted network with the width of 2 millimeters. The frontier line of separated layers is drawn in Arcview software in the form of closed polygons and the area of these polygons are measured separately. Then any changes in area of these polygons in every stage of photographs are compared through software and the layer changes of the thickness of canopy are provided. The study didn’t show a noticeable change during last four decades. It shows a decrease on its area from 2593 hectares in 1334 to 2577 hectares in 1376.And in fact it has decreased 16 hectares during last forty-two years. And 16 percent of canopy in 1334 was high over 50 percent. While it lessened to 12 percent in 1376.which seems to be issued from felling off trees and firing in the past. And also the forest canopy of 47 percent of these forests was (5-25) percent in 1334 and it increased to 48 percent. In 1376 and 3 percent of increasing was the result of effective controlling and forestry plans. And in -semi- thick (25-50) percent no considerable change is found.

Will Yield Improvements on the Forest Frontier Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? A Global Analysis of Oil Palm

Will Yield Improvements on the Forest Frontier Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? A Global Analysis of Oil Palm

Dynamics of indirect land-use change: Empirical evidence from Brazil

The expansion of a given land use may affect deforestation directly if forests are cleared to free land for this use, or indirectly, via the displacement of other land-use activities from non-forest areas towards the forest frontier. Unlike direct land conversion, indirect land-use changes affecting deforestation are not immediately observable. They require the linking of changes occurring in different regions. This paper empirically assesses the possible indirect effects of sugarcane expansion in Brazil's state of São Paulo, on forest conversion decisions in the country's Amazon region. Further, it examines the evidence for a mechanism through which these effects might materialize, namely a displacement of cattle ranching activities from São Paulo state to the Amazon. The results suggest a positive relationship between sugarcane expansion and deforestation. This indirect land-use effect is shown to be a dynamic process materializing over 10–15 years.

Crop expansion and conservation priorities in tropical countries.

Expansion of cropland in tropical countries is one of the principal causes of biodiversity loss, and threatens to undermine progress towards meeting the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. To understand this threat better, we analysed data on crop distribution and expansion in 128 tropical countries, assessed changes in area of the main crops and mapped overlaps between conservation priorities and cultivation potential. Rice was the single crop grown over the largest area, especially in tropical forest biomes. Cropland in tropical countries expanded by c. 48,000 km2 per year from 1999–2008. The countries which added the greatest area of new cropland were Nigeria, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Brazil. Soybeans and maize are the crops which expanded most in absolute area. Other crops with large increases included rice, sorghum, oil palm, beans, sugar cane, cow peas, wheat and cassava. Areas of high cultivation potential—while bearing in mind that political and socio-economic conditions can be as influential as biophysical ones—may be vulnerable to conversion in the future. These include some priority areas for biodiversity conservation in tropical countries (e.g., Frontier Forests and High Biodiversity Wilderness Areas), which have previously been identified as having ‘low vulnerability’, in particular in central Africa and northern Australia. There are also many other smaller areas which are important for biodiversity and which have high cultivation potential (e.g., in the fringes of the Amazon basin, in the Paraguayan Chaco, and in the savanna woodlands of the Sahel and East Africa). We highlight the urgent need for more effective sustainability standards and policies addressing both production and consumption of tropical commodities, including robust land-use planning in agricultural frontiers, establishment of new protected areas or REDD+ projects in places agriculture has not yet reached, and reduction or elimination of incentives for land-demanding bioenergy feedstocks.