The Costs and Benefits of Soil Conservation: The Farmers' Viewpoint

Abstract

Most countries in Central America and the Caribbean depend heavily on agriculture; efforts to sustain and improve the sector's productivity are therefore crucial to the region's economic development and to the welfare of its people. Land degradation is thought to pose a severe threat to the sustainability of agricultural production. Yet despite long-standing concern about this threat and dramatic claims of environmental damage, surprisingly little empirical analysis has been done on the causes and severity of land degradation problems in the region and on how best to tackle them. Meanwhile, many of the conservation programs designed to address the problems have fallen short of expectations. Often farmers have not adopted the recommended conservation practices or have abandoned them once the project ended. The research presented in this article attempts to bridge the empirical gap, using cost-benefit analysis to investigate the nature and severity of the soil degradation problem and to assess the cost-effectiveness of proposed solutions. Because soil degradation problems tend to be site-specific, the analysis is rooted in case studies, and because conservation programs stand or fall on the participation of farmers, the study's main focus is on the profitability of the measures and the deterrents to their adoption from the farmers' point of view. Soil degradation can be defined as a reduction in the land's actual or potential uses (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). Many cultivation practices tend to degrade soil over time. For example, cultivation can expose soil to water and wind erosion, repeated tillage can weaken soil structure, crop production can remove nutrients, and use of machinery can compact the soil. Central America's mountains and heavy rainfall make much of the region particularly

Climate Change Perception and Farmers’ Adoption of Sustainable Land Management for Robust Adaptation in Cameroon

“…Specifically, households who own at least some of the land they farm are 31% more likely to adopt SLM practices than those who do not. This corroborates Lutz et al (1994) and Shultz et al (1997) assertion that land ownership is likely to influence adoption.…”

The Economics of Desertification, Land Degradation, and Drought Toward an Integrated Global Assessment

“…The study by Lutz, Pagiola, and Reiche (1994) found that landownership positively influences the adoption decision. Pender and Kerr (1998) showed negative effects of sales restrictions of land and tenancy on conservation investments.…”

“…This method is likely to overestimate the values of soil nutrients, as it does not establish any connection between soil nutrients and agricultural production. A decrease in nutrients may have little effect on production, especially when other factors, such as rainfall, represent more important production constraints (Bojö 1996;Lutz, Pagiola, and Reiche 1994). 47 Widely cited applications of the replacement cost approach were developed by Stocking (1986) in Zimbabwe and by Stoorvogel and Smaling (1990), who estimated the nutrients budgets of all Sub-Saharan African countries (Bojö 1996).…”

Overcoming Ex-Post Development Stagnation: Interventions with Continuity and Scaling in Mind

“…Creating conditions to support longer-term sustainability beyond project completion represents a recurring challenge [43] and it is not uncommon for activities and institutions to become inactive ex-post [44,45] or for stakeholders to revert to previously unsustainable practices or to even actively destroy project measures in some cases [46].…”