Stochastic food prices and slash-and-burn agriculture

Environment and Development Economics, 2001, vol. 4, issue 02, pages 161-176

Abstract: This paper explores the interrelationship between poverty, risk, and deforestation by small farmers in the low-income tropics. A nonseparable household model reveals how exogenous shocks to the mean or variance of a food price distribution might affect peasants' incentives to clear forest. The resulting links between food price policy, farmer behavior, and deforestation offer an innovative explanation of the vicious cycle of peasant immiserization and tropical deforestation. An intriguing, testable hypothesis also emerges: that market-oriented reforms that increase the mean and variance of food prices may inadvertently stimulate deforestation in economies in which a sizable proportion of farmers are net buyers.

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1355770X99000133 link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Development Economics from Cambridge University Press
Address: The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2RU UK
Series data maintained by Mike Eden ().