The Effects of Agricultural Technological Progress on Deforestation: What Do We Really Know?

Abstract

Increasing agricultural yields seem an obvious way to satisfy increasing demands for food and fuel while minimizing expansion of agriculture into forest areas; however, an influential literature worries that promoting agricultural innovation could enhance agriculture's profitability thereby encouraging deforestation. Clarifying the effects of agricultural technological progress on deforestation is therefore crucial for designing effective policy responses to the challenges faced by global agriculture. In this article we review the empirical evidence on these effects and synthesize estimates of future global cropland expansion. Our main insights are that: (i) the empirical evidence on a positive link between regional technological progress and deforestation is much weaker than what seems generally accepted; (ii) at a global level, most analysts expect broad based technological progress to be land saving; however, composition effects are important as low‐yield, land‐abundant regions are likely to experience further land expansion. Toward the future, empirical work understanding how localized technological progress in agriculture transmits through international trade and commodity markets will help to bridge the gap between the findings of local, econometric, studies on the one hand and global, model based, studies on the other.

High spatial resolution land use and land cover mapping of the Brazilian Legal Amazon in 2008 using Landsat-5/TM and MODIS data

“…This represents more than three times the area occupied by annual agriculture, and also a third of the area occupied by the other classes of pasture. These figures may suggest that if guided by appropriate public policies, it is feasible to induce the expansion of both agriculture and livestock production with a minor impact on deforestation (Sayer and Cassman 2013;Ceddia et al 2014;Villoria et al 2014). …”

What Have We Learned from the Land Sparing-sharing Model?

“…In an agricultural context, rebound effects mean that less land is spared than could be, given the magnitude of yield increases, while backfire effects mean that not only is no land spared, but that more land is converted than would be the case without yield increases. Neither the Borlaug hypothesis nor the Jevons paradox have received strong support from empirical studies [42]. Instead, there is evidence that yield increases usually reduce the rate of land clearance to some extent, but that this land-saving effect is smaller than it could be, because of a rebound effect [34,42,111,112].…”

Perverse Market Outcomes from Biodiversity Conservation Interventions

“…This is associated with a rightward shift in the supply curve and consequently, in the equilibrium (q 0 ,p 0 – q 2 ,p 2 , Figure ), resulting in an overall increase in resources being traded (e.g., Villoria et al . ). The size of this shift in equilibrium does depend on the price elasticity demand of the product—with a more pronounced effect in the case of an elastic demand (where demand varies strongly with prices).…”