Guest Editorial, part of a Special Feature on The influence of human demography and agriculture on natural systems in the Neotropics Globalization and Land-Use Transitions in Latin America

By H. R. Grau, Mitchell Aide. 2008

443 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current socioeconomic drivers of land-use change associated with globalization are producing two contrasting land-use trends in Latin America. Increasing global food demand (particularly in Southeast Asia) accelerates deforestation in areas suitable for modern agriculture (e.g., soybean), severely threatening ecosystems, such as Amazonian rain forests, dry forests, and subtropical grasslands. Additionally, in the coming decades, demand for biofuels may become an emerging threat. In contrast, high yields in modern agricultural systems and rural-urban migration coupled with remittances promote the abandonment of marginal agricultural lands, thus favoring ecosystem recovery on mountains, deserts, and areas of poor soils, while improving human well-being. The potential switch from production in traditional extensive grazing areas to intensive modern agriculture provides opportunities to significantly increase food production while sparing land for nature conservation. This combination of emerging threats and opportunities requires changes in the way the conservation of Latin American ecosystems is approached. Land-use efficiency should be analyzed beyond the local-based paradigm that drives most conservation programs, and focus on large geographic scales involving long-distance fluxes of products, information, and people in order to maximize both agricultural production and the conservation of environmental services.

Subfields: Development, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/faba9e5a3f45fcf32b4244a21cebe52cd7a37da9

How researchers see this paper

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

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Global change effects on humid tropical forests: Evidence for biogeochemical and biodiversity shifts at an ecosystem scale (2016, background): “…remains the dominant trend across the tropics, land use changes that restore native tropical forest cover without management or infrastructure costs have significant and positive implications for plant growth and terrestrial C storage at a global scale [Grau and Aide, 2008; Grau et al., 2003].”
The Emerging Soybean Production Frontier in Southern Africa: Conservation Challenges and the Role of South‐South Telecouplings (2016, background): “The expansion of soybean agribusiness has occurred mostly in (sub)tropical dry forests and savannas in the Amazon “arc of deforestation,” the Cerrado, the Chaco, and Chiquitania (Grau & Aide 2008).”
The concept of the Anthropocene as a game-changer: a new context for social innovation and transformations to sustainability (2017, background): “Specifically, the shifts in land use to grow biofuel crops had significant impacts on water resources, biological diversity, and created increased food security issues now that land was being used to cultivate fuels instead of food (Grau and Aide 2008).”
Land use transitions and land management: A mutual feedback perspective (2018, background): “From then on, the research of forest transition as the core of land use transition research has been pushed forward, mainly focusing on the theoretical development and empirical studies in the Europe countries (Mather, 2004; Mather and Needle, 1998) as well as countries in Asia (Mather, 2007) and Am”
Characterizing commercial oil palm expansion in Latin America: land use change and trade (2017, background): “Latin America has a longer history of urbanization and lower rural population density compared to Asia, resulting in low-productivity cattle pastures as the defining feature of rural landscapes [40].”
Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity (2011, unknown): “In Latin America, increasing global food demand accelerates deforestation in high potential areas for intensive agriculture while marginal agricultural lands are abandoned (46).”
Conservation policy in traditional farming landscapes (2012, background): “Globalization has now reached many traditional farming landscapes which were relatively isolated until fairly recently, in Europe but also in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Grau & Aide 2008; Perfecto & Vandermeer 2010).”