Land occupations and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

Researchers are increasingly interested in understanding the impact of contentious social processes on land change. In the Brazilian Amazon, there are often contentious interactions between landholders defending private property rights and squatters who have the right to occupy land that is deemed unproductive. Previous studies suggest that the contentious social processes inherent in the Brazilian land tenure and land reform system cause a significant amount of deforestation. An environment of insecure land title, and policies that value deforested land over forested land, among other factors, encourage both landholders and squatters to deforest more land than is necessary for pasture or crop production. This paper examines the impact that land occupations have on deforestation at the municipal scale across the Brazilian Legal Amazon, from 2000-2009. We show that land occupations have a direct influence on deforestation. We use spatial analysis as well to show that land occupations have a spatial component in the effect on deforestation: occupations in one municipality affect deforestation in adjacent areas.

Agricultural Productivity and Forest Conservation: Evidence from the Brazilian Amazon

“…There is also evidence in the literature for the importance of incentives for speculative land clearing. A range of studies support the argument that cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon is used as a land speculation strategy (Hecht 1993;Walker et al 2009;Richards, Walker, and Arima 2014), and that uncertain land tenure encourages clearing more land than is strictly required for agricultural production (Brown, Brown, and Brown 2016). In this respect, the increased regularization of land in priority municipalities, through increased enforcement and the adoption of the CAR-one of the requirements to be removed from the PL-may have further reduced incentives to clear new land.…”

Stimulus for land grabbing and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

“…Also, the new law extends these benefits for large areas up to 2500 hectares [1], which represents a 1000 hectares increase compared to the previous legislation [7]. All these factors have the potential to stimulate further land grabs and forest loss, since they reinforce a preemption mechanism for acquiring land rights [7] that has been historically linked to deforestation in the Amazon region [8][9][10].…”

“…In this preemption mechanism: (i) the private parties occupy public land and, in some cases, expel indigenous peoples or traditional communities previously occupying these areas; (ii) they deforest the area and plant grass to raise cattle, which is a relatively cheap way to signal land use [10]; (iii) they request a Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.…”

Land speculation and conservation policy leakage in Brazil

“…In the context of agricultural frontier expansion, the speculative component of the price of forestland constantly changes with new investments into infrastructure making pastures or cropland more profitable (Hecht andMann 2008, Sauer andPereira Leite 2012). Similarly, priority shifts in the enforcement of property rights and conservation policies may affect speculative behavior on land markets (Araujo et al 2009, Brown et al 2016, Azevedo et al 2017, Koch et al 2017. When governments devise conservation policies to counteract frontier expansion, conservation priorities and enforcement effectiveness tend to vary in space leading to leakage effects (Fearnside 2009, Barona et al 2010, Lapola et al 2010, Soares-Filho et al 2010, Gibbs et al 2015.…”