Agricultural Expansion and Tropical Deforestation

International Trade, Poverty and Land Use

Solon L. Barraclough, Krishna B. Ghimire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781853836664
• eBook ISBN: 9781317972976
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ecología

There is no clear-cut causal relationship between international trade, agricultural expansion and tropical deforestation. Academics, policy-makers and the public are all tempted by simplistic solutions to complex problems. In order to establish the true causal factors involved in this critical area of environmental decline, the authors of this study present case studies ranging over three continents. Utilizing statistics, it is shown that the focus of analysis of deforestation must be applied as much to the misguided policies of national and regional authorities as to the forces of trade and globalization. Further, it demonstrates that we must adopt a critical perspective on the historical context of human use of forest areas, looking at issues such as systems of land tenure. The primary aim of the book is to highlight the need to seek solutions in far-reaching institutional and policy reforms adapted to specific socio-economic and ecological contexts, if the problem of tropical deforestation is to be tackled effectively.

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF DEFORESTATION

Accelerated tropical deforestation during recent decades has resulted in the conversion of hundreds of millions of hectares of tropical forests to other land uses such as growing crops, pastures, roads, mines, reservoirs, industrial, residential or administrative areas and wastelands. In 1980, about one-tenth of the world’s nearly 2 billion hectares of remaining tropical forests were estimated to have been converted to other land uses during the subsequent decade alone. Even vaster areas of tropical forests have been badly degraded by logging, excessive fuelwood extraction, industrial pollution, overgrazing, destructive man-made fires and many other deforestation processes caused by humans.

This version of the deforestation narrative is, however, essentially tautological. It merely views volatile combinations of several long-recognized deforestation processes as being the proximate causes of tropical deforestation. This suggests little in the way of cures other than to attempt to stop such processes.

At a more general level, by definition, human-induced (anthropogenic) deforestation is ultimately caused by people and their activities. The implicit remedies embodied in the definition are to halt or reverse population growth and to eliminate activities stimulating tropical deforestation. Population stabilization or reduction is at best a long-term proposition. Most people entering the labour force and reaching reproductive age during the coming two decades are already with us. Excluding a massive demographic catastrophe, the world population will increase by between one-fourth to one-half by the year 2025, with the majority of this population growth taking place in poor countries. Modifying human activities to become more environmentally friendly appears more promising in terms of stopping destructive deforestation during the foreseeable future, unless one believes that it is beyond human control. Solutions have to be sought to change humankind’s values, social relations and activities. This implies the reform of institutions and policies at sub-national, national and international levels. Research can help to indicate how they might be reformed to encourage the socially and ecologically sustainable use of natural resources in tropical forest regions.

Deforestation ‘stories’ that indicate feasible remedies have to include the social origins of deforestation processes and their social impacts. These social determinants are primarily institutions (relatively stable rules and customs regulating social relations), policies (purposeful courses of action by diverse social actors), and technologies (the applications of science and experience for socially defined practical ends). Deforestation narratives have to confront issues of power relations at all levels from the local to the global. They need to deal with the perceived identities and goals of diverse social actors as well as with the frequently unanticipated and unintended outcomes of conflicting policies pursued in a context of interacting dynamic social and ecological systems and sub-systems. In other words, deforestation stories that could contribute to the more sustainable use of natural resources in tropical forest regions have to include the political and socioeconomic dimensions as well as the ecological ones.

This is widely recognized at the conceptual level, but the complexities and uncertainties inherent in analyses of interacting social and natural systems are frequently forgotten in practice. Many researchers are under tremendous pressures to be ‘policy relevant’ and to recommend ‘practical’, albeit simplistic, solutions. For example, agricultural expansion together with the plundering of remaining forests is spurred by population growth and trade. These are widely viewed as the leading proximate and ‘root’ sources of recent tropical deforestation. This may sometimes be the case. If true, what does it imply in the way of policy and institutional changes locally, nationally and internationally? Each local and national situation is, to some extent, unique and constantly changing. What reforms could be effective and feasible in different places and times? The international context is also constantly and often dramatically changing. What international reforms could, in the current context, contribute to more sustainable tropical forest resource management?

These questions are not answerable in any definitive manner, but they guided our research. This volume summarizes some of the findings. It argues that deforestation is an outcome of policies pursued by diverse social actors within interacting social and ecological systems at local, national and international levels. In other words, socially undesirable tropical deforestation is a systemic problem that requires deep policy and institutional reforms at all levels. The research shows that agricultural expansion and international trade are important factors but that their roles are varied and frequently contradictory. Their impact on livelihoods and on tropical deforestation depends largely on the contexts in which they occur. In this book we try to sort out several of the complex linkages between the policies of governments and of other social actors on the one hand, and social structures on the other. Finally, we look at public policy and institutional reforms at different levels that could help to promote more sustainable uses of tropical forest resources.

A COMPLEX ISSUE

Tropical deforestation has been a major theme in the countless discussions, reports and publications leading to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio. It will undoubtedly continue to be a central international environmental issue during coming years. However, there is much disagreement, even among specialists, about the dynamics of deforestation and its socioeconomic and ecological implications if the widely conflicting claims about its causes, extent, impacts and remedies can be taken as evidence. This is particularly true of the role of agricultural expansion that is frequently blamed for some 60 per cent of the current rapid deforestation in the tropics of up to 20 million hectares annually (World Bank, 1992).

The reasons why shrinking areas of tropical forests arouse increasing anxiety are now widely known. The livelihoods of over 200 million forest dwellers and poor settlers depend directly on food, fibre, fodder, fuel and other resources taken from the forest or produced on recently cleared forest soils. Many millions more live from employment in forest based crafts, industries and related activities. Numerous indigenous groups are threatened with genocide induced by alienation or destruction of their source of life support. Degradation of forest habitats is accompanied by the extinction of many species of flora and fauna. This loss of biodiversity poses fundamental ethical questions as well as more material ones about lost options for the future. Ecosystems upon which humans ultimately depend may collapse. Soil erosion, salinization and compaction may prove irreversible, as may adverse changes in local and regional climates. Deforestation is frequently accompanied by more devastating floods downstream and the depletion of water reserves in underground aquifers, lakes and reservoirs. Tropical deforestation contributes to the build-up of greenhouse gases that may induce global climate change with incalculable consequences. Future supplies of food, fuel and timber to meet the needs generated by economic growth and increasing populations could be imperilled or become more costly. Rapidly expanding mass tourism in many poor countries poses both new threats and opportunities for more sustainable uses of tropical forests. Conflicts of interests between transnational corporations mostly based in the North and those of many rural poor in developing countries are intensifying, as are conflicts between rich and poor country governments about the proper management of ‘the heritage of all mankind’.

Not all deforestation is incompatible with sustainable development. The world’s temperate forests have been reduced by over one-third in recent centuries. Many of these formerly forested areas were cleared for agricultural and other human uses. Much of this former forest land now supports large and relatively prosperous populations with highly productive farms, industries and cities. Deforestation has apparently stabilized in industrialized countries. There are also large once-forested areas in the tropics that have supported dense populations for centuries.

People denied other alternatives than wresting a bare living by clearing forest will try to survive even where conditions render continuous cultivation unsustainable. At the same time, lucrative short-term profits can frequently be reaped by powerful élites in both industrialized and developing countries. Northern investors and consumers commonly benefit disproportionately from cash crop and timber exports from the tropics at the expense of forest-dependent poor people in the South and a sustainable environment.

Many interrelated processes contribute to tropical deforestation. Agricultural expansion is prominent among them, but this in turn includes numerous sub-processes responding to different dynamics. Moreover, local level deforestation processes differ greatly from place to place and over time. Simplistic generalizations based on global or regional and national data are not very helpful in understanding the complex causes and social and ecological impacts of deforestation, or in suggesting remedial actions, in specific localities. An analytical case study approach is more appropriate. This was shown by the authors’ earlier research into the social dynamics of deforestation (Barraclough and Ghimire, 1995).

PRINCIPAL QUESTIONS GUIDING THE RESEARCH

The research first reviewed estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and a number of other international sources of recent land use changes and deforestation trends in developing countries. Case studies were then commissioned in five countries – Brazil, Guatemala, Cameroon, Malaysia and China. The objective of the case studies was to explore critically the dynamics of tropical deforestation in specific socioeconomic, political and ecological contexts. Special emphasis was placed on the roles of agricultural expansion and international trade in stimulating deforestation processes.

The research followed a political economy approach. It attempted to identify the nature and importance of diverse socioeconomic processes leading to tropical deforestation in specific subnational regions and localities. It gave explicit attention to the social actors involved and on how they may have benefited or been negatively affected by the clearance or degradation of tropical forests and by the expansion of agriculture into forest areas. The implications of these processes for the livelihoods of low-income groups directly or indirectly affected was another principal focus of the case studies. This identification and analysis of deforestation processes constituted the first set of research issues and questions.

The second set of issues related to the roles of policies in stimulating, directing or checking deforestation as well as in magnifying or attenuating its social and ecological impact. Public policies at national levels are always crucial, but sub-national and international policies of the state and of other social actors, such as corporate bodies and NGOs, can also be extremely important.

Governments are only one component of the institutional framework that defines and regulates any society. Policy analysis is rather meaningless, especially for comparative purposes, unless it is carefully linked with a society’s broader institutional framework in which government policies are generated and carried out. The institutional determinants of deforestation processes constitute, a third cluster of issues and questions. The research considered both policies and institutions, emphasizing their linkages and dynamic interactions.

In the policy field, land use and agricultural and forest policies should obviously receive attention. Policies regarding land settlement, rural development and forest protection readily come to mind. Many policies that may appear remote from deforestation processes can often be crucial. Price and trade policies, fiscal policies and those affecting employment and welfare frequently contribute to accelerating tropical deforestation, as do consumption and production patterns in both rich industrial countries and poor agrarian ones.

The political institutions of government at all levels, as well as economic institutions organizing and regulating production, trade and consumption, mediate policies and market forces. Logging, mining, infrastructure construction and agricultural expansion often directly drive deforestation processes. Both land tenure and farming systems are closely related institutions that were central everywhere in this research. In certain circumstances, however, population movements and environmental dynamics have also played an important role.

Land tenure

Land tenure institutions determine the rights and obligations of different social actors, such as individuals, clans, local communities, corporate bodies and the state in access to land, water, forests and other natural resources and in the distribution of their benefits. In agrarian societies land tenure also defines the obligations of those who work the land in relation to those who accumulate its surplus. Analyses of land tenure systems are central for understanding the nature of tropical deforestation processes, who benefits from them and who is prejudiced. Land tenure relationships are a good indicator of social relationships in the broader society. They reflect the relative power of different social classes and diverse ethnic groups. Land tenure systems in distant nonforested areas may frequently be a principal factor in forcing landless workers and peasants to invade tropical forests.

Farming systems

Farming systems constitute distinctive combinations of social relations (for example, land tenure), farming practices and technologies, land use and cropping patterns, consumption standards, access to markets and so on, that tend to go together and reproduce themselves. They reflect both social relations and economic structures of the broader society as well as the constraints imposed on agriculture by climate, soils, water availability and biological endowments. Very different farming systems can coexist in the same ecological context. Low external input systems aimed primarily at self-provisioning and high external input systems producing for national or international markets are often found side by side. Within each broad type of farming system there can be numerous sub-systems with distinctive social relations, land use and production patterns.

Demographic issues

Demographic issues raise a further cluster of complex research questions. In-migration, out-migration, birth rates and mortality rates all interact among themselves as well as with political, socioeconomic and environmental factors. Their impact on agricultural expansion and tropical deforestation has to be analysed in each unique context, as broad generalizations can be very misleading.

Natural environment

The same is true of the constraints imposed by the natural environment. Soils, climate, water availability and the biological dynamics of each ecosystem have to be taken into account. One does not cultivate water-demanding crops in areas of semi-arid savannah tropical forests without encountering great difficulties, while dryland crop production in areas of humid tropical forests is seldom an attractive proposition. These constraints influence both agricultural expansion and possible alternatives.

Alternatives

Finally, what are the alternatives to tropical forest clearance for people depending upon agriculture for their livelihoods? Much depends upon the level of analysis. Alternatives for residents of a local ecosystem such as a particular river basin, plateau or community may appear very limited, but they become much less constrained if broader ecological and political boundaries are assumed. We have attempted to look at some of the initiatives to check agricultural expansion into tropical forests at various levels from local communities to the nation state and beyond.

THE CASE STUDY COUNTRIES

Brazil

Brazil includes a major portion of the Amazon rain forests that are threatened by agricultural expansion and other deforestation processes as well as several other tropical forest areas that have already been largely cleared. According to the FAO, 36,780 million hectares of new land were brought into ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps, Tables and Boxes
• About the Cooperating Organizations
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Study Countries: Maps
• 1. Introduction: Social Determinants of Deforestation
• 2. The Extent of Tropical Deforestation and Agricultural Expansion in Developing Countries
• 3. Tropical Deforestation and Agricultural Expansion in the Case Study Countries
• 4. Linkages with International Trade
• 5. Towards More Sustainable Use of Tropical Agricultural and Forest Resources
• Bibliography
• Index