Soybeans, Development and Conservation on the Amazon Frontier

By S. Hecht. 2005

250 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bolivia's rate of deforestation throughout the 1990s was among the most rapid anywhere in the Amazon Basin. This drastic clearing stood in sharp contrast to the relatively slow rates of landscape change that had prevailed in previous decades. This article reviews the models used for explaining deforestation, and argues that the new context of globalization, structural adjustment, regional integration and rapid technological change contributed to accelerated forest cutting during the 1990s. The author suggests that many environmental policy approaches developed during the 1970s and 1980s no longer address the current clearing situation effectively, and that today's frontiers differ profoundly from previous ones. The widely held idea that intensive production per se reduces forest destruction may not be valid on tropical agro-industrial frontiers, such as the soybean zones of Bolivia and Brazil.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ce9bee3b1d2a397e21bf3aa12b20829346ecde3

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Citations in the corpus

Balancing food production and nature conservation in the Neotropical dry forests of northern Argentina (2008, background): “Some case studies showed that an increase in agriculture productivity per se does not necessarily reduce deforestation within a region (Hecht, 2005; Morton et al., 2006), and the expansion of modern agriculture can improve access into remote areas, sti- mulating immigration and promoting additional…”
The meat of the global food crisis (2013, background): “This is widely recognized as one reason why some industrial livestock production in the US has gravitated towards poorer regions in pockets of the South and Midwest. production that is mainly used for feed (Hecht 2005, Barreto et al. 2007).”
Interactions among Amazon land use, forests and climate: prospects for a near-term forest tipping point (2008, background): “A similar process of commodity market-driven soya expansion is underway in the Bolivian Amazon (Hecht 2005).”
Forest Resources Assessment of 2015 shows positive global trends but forest loss and degradation persist in poor tropical countries (2015, background): “In the tropics, where most forest change has occurred, deforestation due to smallholder agricultural expansion has given way to large-scale, enterprise-driven forest conversion (Hecht, 2005; Rudel, 2007; Asner et al., 2013).”
Research, part of a Special Feature on The influence of human demography and agriculture on natural systems in the Neotropics Total Historical Land-Use Change in Eastern Bolivia: Who, Where, When, and How Much? (2008, background): “Lowland Bolivia provides a distinctly interesting landscape with which to understand how different social groups react to the stimulus of international markets and public policies that are designed to stimulate economic growth and conserve forest (Pacheco 2006, Hecht 2005).”
International Labor Migration from a Tropical Development Frontier: Globalizing Households and an Incipient Forest Transition (2008, background): “growing evidence of non-local and extra-national forces as the drivers of forest cover change (Hecht 2005; Sloan 2007).”
Middle-range theories of land system change (2018, background): “First, declining yields and profitability of pioneer agriculture (due to soil degradation or poor soil quality) with out-migration of smallholders leads to the formation of a “hollow frontier”, with depopulation and extensive land uses (Casetti and Gauthier, 1977; Hecht, 2005; Rudel et al., 2002).”
Decentralized governance and environmental change: Local institutional moderation of deforestation in Bolivia (2007, background): “…of deforestation, it would be crucial to consider factors that previous studies have found to be robust determinants, such as the density of roads, forest dependency, and public policies (for example, Deacon, 1999; Hecht & Cockburn, 1989; Hecht, 2005; Kaimowitz and Angelsen, 1998; Moran, 1982).”
The Emerging Soybean Production Frontier in Southern Africa: Conservation Challenges and the Role of South‐South Telecouplings (2016, background): “Even as the soybean boom was provoking a shift of deforestation to deciduous dry forest and savannas (Grau & Aide 2008), the conservation agenda remained biased toward the Amazon, and conservation policies in dry forests and savannas thus remain weak (Hecht 2005).”
Theorizing Land Cover and Land Use Change: The Peasant Economy of Amazonian Deforestation (2007, background): “Land cover change in Bolivia has been studied (Godoy, Jacobson, and Wilkie 1998; Mertens et al. 2004; Hecht 2005), where colonization processes have a long history (Stearman 1984).”
Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America (2016, background): “Soy production was heavily critiqued by conservationists due to the social and ecological impacts arising from monocultures that drench landscapes in glyphosate and pesticides, and the history of violent displacement and extensive deforestation that produced these landscapes in the first place (Hech”