Land-use policies and corporate investments in agriculture in the Gran Chaco and Chiquitano

Abstract

Growing demand for agricultural commodities is causing the expansion of agricultural frontiers onto native vegetation worldwide. Agribusiness companies linking these frontiers to distant spaces of consumption through global commodity chains increasingly make zero-deforestation pledges. However, production and land conversion are often carried out by less-visible local and regional actors that are mobile and responsive to new agricultural expansion opportunities and legal constraints on land use. With more stringent deforestation regulations in some countries, we ask whether their movements are determined partly by differences in land-use policies, resulting in "deforestation havens." We analyze the determinants of investment decisions by agricultural companies in the Gran Chaco and Chiquitano, a region that has become the new deforestation "hot spot" in South America. We test whether companies seek out less-regulated forest areas for new agricultural investments. Based on interviews with 82 companies totaling 2.5 Mha of properties, we show that, in addition to proximity to current investments and the availability of cheap forestland, lower deforestation regulations attract investments by companies that tend to clear more forest, mostly cattle ranching operations, and that lower enforcement attracts all companies. Avoiding deforestation leakage requires harmonizing deforestation regulations across regions and commodities and promoting sustainable intensification in cattle ranching.pollution haven | leakage | land-use change | soy | cattle

Carbon emissions from agricultural expansion and intensification in the Chaco

“…Tropical dry forests and savannas in South America have suffered disproportionally from deforestation recently (Hansen et al ., ), including the Cerrado (Klink & Machado, ), the Chiquitano (Müller et al ., ), and the Chaco forests (Gasparri & Grau, ). In addition to deforestation, agricultural intensification is widespread, as traditional grazing systems are increasingly replaced by intensified ranching, which itself often makes way to industrialized cropping, mainly soybean and maize (le Polain de Waroux et al ., ). These intensification trends have major ecological effects.…”

On the System. Boundary Choices, Implications, and Solutions in Telecoupling Land Use Change Research

“…Here, again, the Chinese investors' position in the system enabled them to assert power and influence over the land use change in a manner that cut across established institutional 'scales'. A further and more general point here is that our case illustrates the misfit between the territorial governance arrangements and the functioning of this land system, something increasingly discussed within LSS in relation to the need for developing better synergies between territorial land management structures and flow-based interventions in agricultural production networks [123][124][125][126][127]. However, where these discussions have so far generally drawn on points from the global production network and value chains literature, the system thinking approach advocated in this paper adds a more social constructivist perspective to these discussions.…”

The impact of climate change uncertainty on California's vegetation and adaptation management

“…The integration of remote sensing‐based data for landscape condition has found application in other fields, such as tracking the relative success of forest management policies to detect leakage of carbon via deforestation (le Polain de Waroux et al. ) and compliance (Heilmayr and Lambin ). This study illustrates the utility of integrating land‐cover maps derived from remote sensing with climate projections specifically to measure in situ risk, which has the advantage of avoiding many of the assumptions inherent in SDMs and DGVMs (Wiens et al.…”