Property rights and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

By Claudio Araujo, C. Bonjean, Jean-Louis Combes, P. C. Motel, E. Reis. 2009

272 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper focuses on the impact of property rights insecurity on deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon. Deforestation is considered as a risk management strategy: property rights insecurity reduces the present value of forests and fosters forest conversion into agricultural and pasture lands. Moreover, deforestation is the consequence of strategic interactions between landowners and squatters. Landowners clear the forest preventively in order to assert the productive use of land and to reduce the expropriation risk. Squatters invade land plots, clear the forest and may afterwards gain official recognition with formal property titles. A particular attention is paid to the measure of land property rights insecurity in the Brazilian context. It is assumed that property rights insecurity has a multidimensional character taken into account by the number of homicides related to land conflicts and expropriation procedures. Principal component analysis allows synthesising such information. An econometric model of deforestation is estimated on a panel dataset on the 1988–2000 period and the nine states of the Brazilian Legal Amazon. The hypothesis that insecure land property rights contribute to higher rates of deforestation is not rejected when the simultaneity bias between insecure property rights and deforestation is addressed. This result questions the modality of the Brazilian land reform that considers forested areas as unproductive and thus open for expropriation procedures.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/452949f6fa21d19dbf246a4f857f330a1b2affb9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Global and Planetary Change

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Biofuels: Efficiency, Ethics, and Limits to Human Appropriation of Ecosystem Services (2010, background): “…lead to an expansion of ethanol demand that can promote further deforestation (Morton et al. 2006; Laurance 2007; Nepstad et al. 2008; Sawyer 2008; Araujo et al. 2009) and the current wave of destruction in the Amazon could leave lasting consequences for the natural ecosystem but few lasting…”
Economic Causes of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: A Panel Data Analysis for the 2000s (2013, background): “6 State-level analyses of deforestation dynamics for earlier periods do not find an effect of agricultural prices on deforestation (see Araujo et al. 2009 for cattle prices over 1988-2000, and Ferraz 2001, for agricultural product prices over 1980-1998). 7 Barreto et al. (2009) make a first attemp”
Relationship between openness to trade and deforestation: : Empirical evidence from the Brazilian Amazon (2016, methodology): “Further evidence suggests that most landholders do not have legal titles or have fake titles of their land (Araujo et al., 2009).”
Deforestation slowdown in the Brazilian Amazon: prices or policies? (2015, background): “…and Margulis, 1991; Reis and Guzmán, 1994; Pfaff, 1999; Chomitz and Thomas, 2003; Arima et al., 2007; Pfaff et al., 2007; Weinhold and Reis, 2008; Araujo et al., 2009; Hargrave and Kis-Katos, 2013), there is scarce empirical evidence on the immediate drivers of the sharp decrease in Amazon…”
Rights to Land, Forests and Carbon in REDD+: Insights from Mexico, Brazil and Costa Rica (2011, background): “In many countries, especially in tropical regions, these contested landscapes have also been shaped by persistent agricultural frontier expansion, in which diverse actors, sometimes with active state intervention, compete to take advantage of timber resources and clear the forest as a way to claim l”
System complexity and policy integration challenges: The Brazilian Energy- Water-Food Nexus (2019, background): “Clearing forest is also a strategy used by landowners to protect the land from illegal occupation by squatters [107], leading to both a tragedy of the commons effect and challenges to law enforcement [48].”