High-yield oil palm expansion spares land at the expense of forests in the Peruvian Amazon
By V. Gutiérrez-Vélez, Ruth S. DeFries, M. Pinedo-Vasquez, María Uriarte, C. Padoch, Walter E. Baethgen, K. Fernandes, Yili Lim. 2011
174 citations recorded by the source corpus.
High-yield agriculture potentially reduces pressure on forests by requiring less land to increase production. Using satellite and field data, we assessed the area deforested by industrial-scale high-yield oil palm expansion in the Peruvian Amazon from 2000 to 2010, finding that 72% of new plantations expanded into forested areas. In a focus area in the Ucayali region, we assessed deforestation for high- and smallholder low-yield oil palm plantations. Low-yield plantations accounted for most expansion overall (80%), but only 30% of their expansion involved forest conversion, contrasting with 75% for high-yield expansion. High-yield expansion minimized the total area required to achieve production but counter-intuitively at higher expense to forests than low-yield plantations. The results show that high-yield agriculture is an important but insufficient strategy to reduce pressure on forests. We suggest that high-yield agriculture can be effective in sparing forests only if coupled with incentives for agricultural expansion into already cleared lands.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/512dcb60089853bb942f6ab85b795da5267e3467
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Forest Resources Assessment of 2015 shows positive global trends but forest loss and degradation persist in poor tropical countries (2015, background): “…agricultural potential and little forest cover, the contrary is often the case when infrastructure expansion targets mineral resources or estate crops and, to a lesser degree, industrial timber plantations (Gutiérrez-Vélez et al., 2011; Durán et al., 2013; Weng et al., 2013; Gaveau et al., 2014).”
- Oil palm expansion transforms tropical landscapes and livelihoods (2012, background): “Indeed, improving production per unit area is an important topic of research that could benefit producer communities while sparing land for conservation (Griffiths and Fairhurst, 2003; Fischer et al., 2008; Gutierrez-Velez et al., 2011).”