Introduction Directory UMM :Data Elmu:jurnal:A:Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment:Vol82.Issue1-3.Dec2000:

Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 82 2000 73–88 Intensified production systems on western Brazilian Amazon settlement farms: could they save the forest? q C. Line Carpentier a,∗ , Stephen A. Vosti b , Julie Witcover b a Wallace Center for Agricultural and Environmental Policy at Winrock International, 9200 Edmonston Road, Suite 117, Greenbelt, MD 20770, USA b Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, U.C. Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA Abstract Annual land-use decisions of settlement farmers, estimated to approach half a million in the Amazon, can have significant impacts on forest conversion of the largest tropical moist forests. Given the biodiversity and climate change consequences of the disappearance of this forest, it is pivotal to understand these farmers’ reactions to combinations of technologies, policies, and institutional arrangements to predict their deforestation implications. This study aims to find whether settlement farmers in the western Brazilian Amazon will adopt more intensive production systems, and if they do, what the impact of this adoption would be on deforestation and farm incomes. Adoption of four types of intensification and their economic and environmental impacts were predicted using a farm level bioeconomic linear programming model. The four intensification types were: no intensification, intensification of non-livestock activities on cleared land, intensification on all cleared land, and intensification on both cleared and forested land. Intensified land uses on either the cleared or forested lands generate higher returns to labor and land, and thus will likely be adopted by settlement farmers. Also, intensification of non-livestock activities on cleared land resulted in the largest deforestation rates. Despite its lower deforestation rate, intensification on all cleared land including pasture resulted in the least amount of preserved forest after 25 years. More precisely it decimated the forest. Intensification on forested land — low-impact forest management — slowed the deforestation rate, but did not stop it unless timber prices were increased to R550 m − 3 a R435 increase over 1994 prices. Even with intensified activities on forested land, pasture still dominated the landscape. In the long run, there is a trade-off between farm income and forest preserved, which results from intensification of land uses on the cleared land. Under the current socioeconomic and political setting existing intensification systems on the cleared land will not save the forest. Intensification systems on forested lands provide better hope because they increase the value of the standing forest, thus counteracting the pressure to deforest. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Bioeconomic model; Settlement farmers; Intensification; Amazon forest; Low-impact forest management; Forest margins; Brazil q Authors’ names appear in alphabetical order; no senior author- ship is ascribed. ∗ Corresponding author. Present address: CEC 393, rue St-Jacques Ouest, Bureau 200 Montreal Quebec, Canada H2Y 1N9. Tel.: + 1-514-350-4336; fax: +1-514-350-4314. E-mail address: carpentierccemtl.org C. Line Carpentier.

1. Introduction

Deforestation in the largest tropical moist forests has consequences for biodiversity and climate change, of both national and international concern. This study uses a farm level bioeconomic model FaleBEM to simulate the effects of four types of intensification on deforestation and farm incomes. Three levels of inten- 0167-880900 – see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 6 7 - 8 8 0 9 0 0 0 0 2 1 7 - 6 74 C. Line Carpentier et al. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 82 2000 73–88 sification on cleared land are simulated: no intensifi- cation, intensification of non-livestock activities, and intensification on all cleared land. In addition, intensi- fication on forested land modeled as low-impact forest management is also simulated. The study focuses on what researchers and poli- cymakers might do to design and manage intensi- fication technologies that slow deforestation while maintaining or increasing farmers’ income. If halting deforestation is the goal, it is found that sustainable intensification requires a redesign of the type of agri- cultural technology being developed and made avail- able to farmers, and that agricultural intensification is necessary but not sufficient to slow deforestation. Po- tential impacts on deforestation should be taken into account at the onset of technology research. Intensifi- cation in forested areas, modeled as low-impact forest management, is promising because it increases the value of the standing forest and thus should be further researched. The geographical focus of this study in the western Brazilian Amazon is the settlement project of Pedro Peixoto in the state of Acre. This site was chosen be- cause of its biophysical and socioeconomic diversity, and because, when this research was initiated, the area was relatively under-studied in comparison to the east- ern Amazon. This site is also similar agroclimatically to much of the Amazon basin and to other tropical ar- eas outside Latin America Gillison, 1999. For these reasons, the settlement was selected as one of the sites for the alternatives to slash-and-burn ASB pro- gram — a long-term collaborative, interdisciplinary research effort — under which the model presented here was developed. The focus on farm-level analysis is useful to capture the heterogeneity in biophysical conditions, market access, market imperfections, or market failure these farms face and the impact of this heterogeneity on land-use decisions. This study aims to find whether settlement farmers in the western Brazilian Amazon will adopt more in- tensive production systems and, if they do, the impact of this adoption on deforestation and incomes. The next section reviews the intensification–extensification debate. Section 2.3 describes what it means to inten- sify on settlement farms in the state of Acre. Section 3 describes how intensification–extensification de- cisions are modeled. Section 4 simulates whether farmers adopt these intensification strategies and, if they do, reports the income and deforestation impacts of this adoption. Section 5 concludes the study and presents policy implications.

2. Intensification and deforestation in the forest margin