Land Property Rights, Agricultural Intensification, and Deforestation in Indonesia

Christoph Kubitza, Vijesh Krishna, Kira Urban, Zulkifli Alamsyah and Matin Qaim

Ecological Economics, 2018, vol. 147, issue C, 312-321

Abstract: The expansion of agricultural land remains one of the main drivers of deforestation in tropical regions. Stronger land property rights could possibly enable farmers to increase input intensity and productivity on the already cultivated land, thus reducing incentives to expand their farms by deforesting additional land. This hypothesis is tested with data from a panel survey of farm households in Sumatra. The survey data are combined with satellite imageries to account for spatial patterns, such as historical forest locations. Results show that plots for which farmers hold formal land titles are cultivated more intensively and are more productive than untitled plots. However, due to land policy restrictions, farmers located at the historic forest margins often do not hold formal titles. Without land titles, these farmers are less able to intensify and more likely to expand into the surrounding forest land to increase agricultural output. Indeed, forest closeness and past deforestation activities by households are found to be positively associated with current farm size. In addition to improving farmer's access to land titles for non-forest land, better recognition of customary land rights and more effective protection of forest land without recognized claims could be useful policy responses.

Keywords: Rubber; Land-use change; Land titles; Deforestation; Land-sparing agricultural intensification; Smallholders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800917307991
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Land property rights, agricultural intensification, and deforestation in Indonesia (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:147:y:2018:i:c:p:312-321

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.01.021

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().