Economics

Labor scarcity as an underlying cause of the increasing prevalence of deforestation due to cattle pasture development in the southern Yucatán region

Document Type

Article

Abstract

We investigate the problem of understanding the drivers of land use and its change in the southern Yucatán region. Our household data drawn from villages across the region show that as the amount of land devoted to crop cultivation has fallen, the amount of land devoted to pastureland has increased. We investigate this trend using a suite of three reinforcing investigative methods: (1) description and interpretation of direct evidence; (2) comparison of expected returns across main agricultural land uses; and (3) econometric modeling. We find that the increasing prominence of cattle ranching, or the prelude to it by planting pasture, is in part because of the constraints households face in family labor, one of the household's key resources, and the relatively lower labor requirements of cattle ranching. The activity of cattle ranching fits particularly well with the constraints and incentives faced by the typical household in the region. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.

Publication Title

Regional Environmental Change

Publication Date

2-9-2010

Volume

10

Issue

3

First Page

191

Last Page

203

ISSN

1436-3798

DOI

10.1007/s10113-010-0110-z

Keywords

deforestation, land use change, modeling agricultural, Yucatán

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