Beyond Population and Environment: Household Demographic Life Cycles and Land Use Allocation Among Small Farms in the Amazon

Abstract

Most research featuring demographic factors in environmental change has focused on processes operating at the level of national or global populations. This paper focuses on household-level demographic life cycles among colonists in the Amazon, and evaluates the impacts on land use allocation. The analysis goes beyond prior research by including a broader suite of demographic variables, and by simultaneously assessing their impacts on multiple land uses with different economic and ecological implications. We estimate a system of structural equations that accounts for endogeneity among land uses, and the findings indicate stronger demographic effects than previous work. These findings bear implications for modeling land use, and the place of demography in environmental research.

Drivers of Households’ Land-Use Decisions: A Critical Review of Micro-Level Studies in Tropical Regions

“…Perz [63], for example, finds that the number of both old and young household members is correlated with the cultivation of annuals and perennials, no such correlation can be detected for pasture. The relationship between income and land-use change is the most important and interesting, but empirically most challenging one.…”

“…In particular in the absence of functioning labor markets, the availability of household labor, i.e., the composition of households in terms of age and gender, will affect agricultural production decisions and thus land use change [63]. Perz [63], for example, finds that the number of both old and young household members is correlated with the cultivation of annuals and perennials, no such correlation can be detected for pasture.…”

“…Despite these shortcomings, the fact that capital (or access to it) is often found to be correlated with land-use change has some empirical content and points at the important role of capital. A number of studies suggest that capital is an important driver of deforestation for ranching and agriculture purposes [8,52,53,56,62,63,65,71]. The "effect" of capital on land-use change can be very large.…”

“…For example, using data on 132 households from Uruara county in eastern Brazil, Caldas et al [72] find that households with some capital (measured as durable goods available to the household upon arrival on the property) deforest between 20-30 hectares more of forest than poorer households without any capital (the mean farm size in the study is 23 hectares). In addition, access to capital is also found to be associated with the adoption of longer term and higher yielding activities such as the cultivation of perennial cash crops and adoption of pasture in a number of studies [63,73,74]. Kaminski and Thomas [48] investigate the impact of institutional reforms within the cotton sector on households' land uses in Burkina Faso, Africa.…”

Rural household demographics, livelihoods and the environment

“…In work focusing on the vicinity of Uruará (Pará, Brazil), researchers have investigated deforestation and secondary forest dynamics using remote sensing and panel data collected from field surveys Walker et al, 2002;Perz et al, 2006). Regression analyses show that more household labor is associated with more deforestation, an effect that dominates any impacts associated with internal dependency due to young children and elderly individuals.…”