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Agricultural expansion, forest products as safety nets, and deforestation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2007

PHILIPPE DELACOTE
PHILIPPE DELACOTE
Affiliation:
Economics Department, EUI, Florence, Villa San Paolo, Via della Piazzuola 43, 50 133 Florence, Italy Email: philippe.delacote@eui.eu
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Abstract

This paper aims to address the impact on deforestation of the use of forest products as safety nets by poor agricultural households. Two safety-net uses may be implemented: the diversification strategy and the coping strategy. With both strategies, crop risk reduction, lower risk aversion and larger population increase tropical deforestation. Forest profitability always tends to increase the forest cover in the diversification case. Conversely, considering the coping strategy, two opposite effects determine the impact of forest profitability on the forest cover: a portfolio effect and an insurance effect. Finally, the household is better off and deforests less when using the diversification strategy instead of the coping strategy.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 235 - 249
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I thank my supervisor, Rick van der Ploeg, for his helpful advice. I also acknowledge useful comments from Arild Angelsen, Pascal Courty, two anonymous reviewers, and an associate editor. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a CERDI seminar, Université d'Auvergne (June 2004), where participants provided valuable comments. This paper has been presented at the ‘14th Annual Conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists’ (Bremen, June 2005) and at the EAERE – FEEM – VIU Summer School in Environmental Economics (Venice, July 2005). I thank the participants for comments. I am grateful to the Lavoisier programme for financial support.