Multiple pathways of commodity crop expansion in tropical forest landscapes

By Patrick Meyfroidt, K. Carlson, Matthew E. Fagan, V. Gutiérrez-Vélez, M. Macedo, L. Curran, Ruth S. DeFries, G. Dyer, Holly K. Gibbs, Eric F. Lambin and 2 more. 2014

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Commodity crop expansion, for both global and domestic urban markets, follows multiple land change pathways entailing direct and indirect deforestation, and results in various social and environmental impacts. Here we compare six published case studies of rapid commodity crop expansion within forested tropical regions. Across cases, between 1.7% and 89.5% of new commodity cropland was sourced from forestlands. Four main factors controlled pathways of commodity crop expansion: (i) the availability of suitable forestland, which is determined by forest area, agroecological or accessibility constraints, and land use policies, (ii) economic and technical characteristics of agricultural systems, (iii) differences in constraints and strategies between small-scale and large-scale actors, and (iv) variable costs and benefits of forest clearing. When remaining forests were unsuitable for agriculture and/or policies restricted forest encroachment, a larger share of commodity crop expansion occurred by conversion of existing agricultural lands, and land use displacement was smaller. Expansion strategies of large-scale actors emerge from context-specific balances between the search for suitable lands; transaction costs or conflicts associated with expanding into forests or other state-owned lands versus smallholder lands; net benefits of forest clearing; and greater access to infrastructure in already-cleared lands. We propose five hypotheses to be tested in further studies: (i) land availability mediates expansion pathways and the likelihood that land use is displaced to distant, rather than to local places; (ii) use of already-cleared lands is favored when commodity crops require access to infrastructure; (iii) in proportion to total agricultural expansion, large-scale actors generate more clearing of mature forests than smallholders; (iv) property rights and land tenure security influence the actors participating in commodity crop expansion, the form of land use displacement, and livelihood outcomes; (v) intensive commodity crops may fail to spare land when inducing displacement. We conclude that understanding pathways of commodity crop expansion is essential to improve land use governance.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a70eaca4ea8cb6b6c8f95c6fa6aa087a37b04969

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

Characterizing commercial oil palm expansion in Latin America: land use change and trade (2017, background): “areas and driving up the local price of food items [22, 23].”
Middle-range theories of land system change (2018, background): “Expansion and intensification can co-occur, for example intensification through the expansion of a more intensive land use over a less intensive one (Baumann et al., 2017; Meyfroidt et al., 2014).”
Trade-offs between environment and livelihoods: Bridging the global land use and food security discussions (2017, unknown): “Intensification also interacts with expansion of land use in complex pathways (Meyfroidt et al. 2014).”
Approaches and terminology for causal analysis in land systems science (2016, background): “Multiple case studies comparison extends the reasoning of natural experiments to encompass situations where several factors vary among cases so that comparison across more than two cases is used to isolate the effects of the different factors (Meyfroidt et al., 2014).”
The Emerging Soybean Production Frontier in Southern Africa: Conservation Challenges and the Role of South‐South Telecouplings (2016, background): “Commodity crop expansion can be steered into multiple pathways, with very different environmental and social outcomes (Meyfroidt et al. 2014).”