Land-use poverty traps identified in shifting cultivation systems shape long-term tropical forest cover

Abstract

In this article we illustrate how fine-grained longitudinal analyses of land holding and land use among forest peasant households in an Amazonian village can enrich our understanding of the poverty/ land cover nexus. We examine the dynamic links in shifting cultivation systems among asset poverty, land use, and land cover in a community where poverty is persistent and primary forests have been replaced over time-with community enclosure-by secondary forests (i.e., fallows), orchards, and crop land. Land cover change is assessed using aerial photographs/satellite imagery from 1965 to 2007. Household and plot level data are used to track land holding, portfolios, and use as well as land cover over the past 30 y, with particular attention to forest status (type and age). Our analyses find evidence for two important types of "land-use" poverty traps-a "subsistence crop" trap and a "short fallow" trap-and indicate that the initial conditions of land holding by forest peasants have long-term effects on future forest cover and household welfare. These findings suggest a new mechanism driving poverty traps: insufficient initial land holdings induce land use patterns that trap households in low agricultural productivity. Path dependency in the evolution of household land portfolios and land use strategies strongly influences not only the wellbeing of forest people but also the dynamics of tropical deforestation and secondary forest regrowth.poverty dynamics | land use and land cover change | path dependency | agroforestry | Peruvian Amazon A central problem in the drive for sustainability is how human welfare and land use are related to one another and influence prospects for growth without jeopardizing Earth's life support systems. Although recent research has advanced significantly our understanding of poverty dynamics and of land use/cover change, such work has proceeded essentially on separate scientific fronts and has yet to be united under the umbrella of sustainability science.The work of economists points to the existence of persistent poverty traps, whereby households, communities, regions, and even countries are caught in self-reinforcing economic equilibria that perpetuate low standards of living (1-5). In peasant farming and pastoral communities, researchers using rich microlevel panel data find that households can face dynamic asset poverty traps, unable to accumulate sufficient land and equipment (or livestock), for example, to adopt more productive agricultural systems and thereby move out of poverty (6-9). Such poverty traps reflect significant path dependency in asset accumulation, i.e., initial conditions of asset holding matter much for households' future welfare. Although the crucial roles of land holdings for peasant farmers have been emphasized and extensively studied (10, 11), the notion of "land-size" poverty traps-whereby small initial land holdings limit future prospects for peasant farmersremain little studied empirically. Moreover, the potentially important role of different land types and lan...

Introduction: The Continued Importance of Smallholders Today

“…The realities of smallholders' poverty and their occupation of a particular position within political-economic systems of often intense inequality that traps them in that position (e.g., [26]) requires that we continue to keep a focus on smallholder studies, even apart from their key role as actors in land systems. The sociopolitical and economic constraints on smallholders are increasingly amplified by climate and socioeconomic and political change, which will continue to push smallholders into precarious positions, raising pressing issues regarding adaptation, vulnerability, and resilience.…”

“…The currents of global environmental change and sustainability have marshalled in a new era of attention to the social-environmental (or ecological) system. Championed by ecology, this new label for human-environment systems has attracted a wide array of practitioners, largely focused on system resilience and vulnerability [49][50][51], poverty traps (e.g., [26]), and ecosystem services, including payments for services otherwise lost in land change [3,52]. Increasingly, this problem orientation has been applied to smallholders worldwide (e.g., [48,53]), with linkages to political ecology (e.g., [54]).…”

Humanitarian Demining and Sustainable Land Management in Post-Conflict Settings in Sri Lanka: Literature Review

“…Land, a source of production of immense importance to people of all social levels, which place an emphasis on building people's endowments of assets so they can enjoy sustainable livelihoods. This is especially true in the case of poor peasants living in remote areas (Coomes et al, 2011). Social, cultural and economic aspects of their lives are closely interwoven with the land.…”

Economic Models of Shifting Cultivation: A Review

“…This lacuna in the theoretical literature is in contrast to the considerable number of empirical studies on primary and secondary forests. Smith et al (1999), for example, show that the relative importance of secondary forest to primary forest increases over time among Amazonian colonists; Coomes et al (2000;2011) also find this pattern over a longer time span among Amazonian peasants (in their study village in Peru, primary forest has virtually disappeared).…”

“…12 Although the extant shifting 12 Migration can also significantly affect the regime shift. Coomes et al (2011) find that urban migration plays an important role in lowering pressure on diminishing forest land among shifting cultivators in their study village. The extensive migration option in the forest frontier, however, may allow farmers to clear forest -both primary and secondary -without employing fallowing practices; this is possible among colonists in land-abundant areas in Latin America, especially in locales where selling cleared lands is an additional motive for forest clearing (Barbier, 2004;Binswanger, 1991;Takasaki, 2007).…”