Agricultural Intensification in a Conservation Area: Sierra del Lacandón National Park, Guatemala

Introduction This paper examines changes in land use intensity and its impact on household food security in Latin America, drawing upon a case study of frontier farmers in the Sierra del Lacandón National Park (SLNP), in the tropical lowlands of Petén, Guatemala (Map 1). This is an area where the agricultural frontier has expanded progressively into closed tropical rainforest, with extremely sparse population in the area until in-migration began in earnest in the late 1960s in the southern edge of the park, and in the 1980s on the eastern edge (Carr 1999; Carr 2008). The park itself was not established until 1998, in response to the perceived threat to the ecological integrity of the area by rapid in-migration (CONAP 2005). This paper makes use of a two sets of crosssectional survey data from 1998 and 2009, collected among frontier settlers in eight subsistence agriculture communities located within or overlapping the borders of the park (Carr 2008). In the intervening 11 years between interview periods the frontier has effectively become closed, as no freely available land exists for claiming, neither by newer arrivals nor by the off-spring of earlier arrivals. During this period, the population of the communities in the area of influence of the park has increased approximately 25%, from an estimated 20,000 people in 1998 to an estimated 25,000 people in 2009 (Suter and López-Carr 2010, pending revisions). This leads to an increase in the population density of this conservation area, with profound implications for both household food security and the conservation of the natural resource base, such as forest cover (Carr, Suter et al. 2005; Carr, Lopez et al. 2009). A higher population density such as that seen here is theorized to be lead to more forest clearing, which smaller average plots size, a possible outcome of higher density farming areas, may stimulate agricultural intensification measures (Barbieri, Bilsborrow et al. 2005; de Sherbinin, Carr et al. 2007). This paper takes as its theoretical framework the multiphasic framework, as adapted from the purely demographic model (Davis 1963) and applied to land use/cover change research (Bilsborrow and Okoth-Ogendo 1992). Specifically, of the posited responses of the rural households to increasing population density (redistribution of land, out-migration, fertility reduction, and/or intensification of land), this paper focuses on indicators related to the intensity of land use. There is no one method to