Land Conversion From Forest to Pasture in Bolivia

For the past two decades, there has been extensive debate on the destructive interaction between beef production and tropical forests in Latin America. The primary concern has been deforestation to provide land for pasture and cattle production. Beef production has been part of the land use mosaic in the Bolivian lowlands for centuries and will undoubtedly remain so for the foreseeable future. However, the passage of new forest legislation in 1996 has decreased the area under forest concession from approximately 20 million, to about six million, hectares and in doing so has made this land available for beef production. The objective of the study is to analyze the land use exchange between beef and timber production to examine the factors that will affect land conversion from forestry to pasture. Results show that policies that increase timber values will not necessarily lead to less land conversion. 1 Graduate student and Associate Professor, School of Forest Resources and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Research funding provided by the Bolivia Sustainable Forest Management Project (BOLFOR), USAID contract # 511-0621-C-00-3027. INTRODUCTION For the past two decades, there has been extensive debate on the destructive interaction between beef production and tropical forests in Latin America. The primary concern has been deforestation to provide land for pasture and cattle production. The literature has focused, with good reason, on two geographic regions: Central America, where the concern was that forests were being destroyed to produce cheap beef for the US market, and Brazil, where vast areas of the Amazon were opened up for cattle production. The increase of land allocated to cattle production at the expense of natural forests is said to be the result of several factors (Kaimowitz 1996) which include: land tenure policies (Jones 1990); extensive cattle production systems (Serrao and Toledo 1992, 1993); low timber values (Kishor and Constantino 1993); production characteristics of cattle (Hecht 1992); favorable markets and prices (Meyers 1981, Nations and Komer 1983); and government subsidies for livestock credit and road construction (Mahar 1988, Binswanger 1991). Although Central America and Brazil have received much of the attention, the interaction between beef and timber production is apparent in many countries of Latin America, including Bolivia. Indeed, beef production has been part of the land use mosaic in the Bolivian lowlands for centuries and will undoubtedly remain so for the foreseeable future. However, the passage of new forest legislation in 1996 has changed the face of the forest industry and in doing so may also affect the beef industry. The new forest law was the result of a deep concern over the future of the Bolivian forest resource, and the policies are being successfully applied to forest concessionaires, forcing them to take responsibility for improving forest management on the public lands under their control. An unfortunate consequence of the legislation is that the area under forest concession has declined from approximately 20 million, to about six million, hectares. Although the return of some land under concession was expected, it was hoped that the land would have been reallocated to forest concessions. In fact, there has been very little land reallocated to concessions. The resulting scenario is one in which there is, or will be, considerable areas of productive forest located on private properties. Most of the former concessions, now returned to the state, were located in land-use zones designated for combined cattle and forestry production. It follows that a private landowner who gains control of that land will have either beef production or forestry as his/her two primary land-use options. What is not clear, however, is whether individual private landowners will find it within their interest to assume responsibility for sustainable management of the forests. Therefore, the objective of the study is to analyze the land use exchange between cattle and timber production to examine what can affect the rate of land conversion from forestry to pasture. MODEL DESCRIPTION AND FORMAT Linear programming is a general optimization technique which can be used to examine the optimal allocation of scarce resources (Buongiorno and Gilless 1987). Linear programming has been used successfully for many years in operations research for both agricultural and forestry production (i.e. Howard 1993, Nicholson et al. 1994, Osho 1995). The model presented here is a multi-year program that examines the addition of forestry into a cattle production