Farm Households and Land Use in a Core Conservation Zone of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala (original) (raw)
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Geographical Review
Guatemala was among the world's leaders in deforestation during the 1990s at a rate of 2% per annum. Much of Guatemala's recent forest loss has occurred in the emerging agricultural frontiers of the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), the heart of the largest contiguous tropical forest in Central America-La Selva Maya. This paper presents data from 241 heads of households and 219 partners of household heads from a geographically stratified sample of eight (of 28) communities in the Sierra de Lacandón National Park (SLNP), the most ecologically biodiverse region in La Selva Maya and a core conservation zone of the MBR. Settler households are examined relative to a host of factors relating land use and land cover change. Specifically, demographic trends, political and socioeconomic development, and ecological factors are described in this first detailed statistically-representative sample probing human population and environment interactions in an emerging agricultural frontier in Central America.
Forest clearing among farm households in the Maya Biosphere Reserve
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Abstract Central America's tropical forests have been felled more rapidly than those of any other world region during the latter half of the twentieth century. During this time, nearly half of Guatemala's forests were eliminated. Most of this deforestation has been concentrated in the northern department of Petén. The remaining forests in Petén are now mainly concentrated in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), the heart of the largest lowland tropical forest in Central America.
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Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography, 2017
Migration necessarily precedes deforestation in tropical agricultural frontiers. Therefore, identifying individual, household and place characteristics (demographic, political, social, economic, and ecological) related to this process is crucial for understanding the drivers of tropical deforestation. This will in turn be useful for developing policies to reduce deforestation, which cannot be approached only from the destination end since this ignores the fundamental role played by migrant farmers advancing the agricultural frontier. This paper uses data from surveys conducted in areas of high out-migration, much to the agricultural frontier in northern Guatemala. Results suggest that larger family sizes, land scarcity, soil degradation, poor access to markets, low education, and poverty are linked to migration to the frontier in Guatemala.
2004
Abstract This paper examines potential differences in land use between Q'eqchí Maya and Ladino (Spanish speakers of mixed ancestry) farmers in a remote agricultural frontier in northern Petén, Guatemala. The research site, the Sierra de Lacandón National Park (SLNP), is a core conservation zone of Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR). In recent years, much has been written about the dramatic process of colonization and deforestation in Petén, Guatemala's largest and northernmost department.
Rural-frontier migration and deforestation in the Sierra de Lacandón National Park, Guatemala
2002
This dissertation explores the primary proximate and underlying causes of deforestation in the Sierra de Lacandón Park (SLNP), Petén, Guatemala. To explore the first cause of this phenomenon, farmer land use, I collected data from community leaders in twenty-eight communities and from 279 settler farmers and 221 women in nine communities in the SLNP. To address the second cause of deforestation in the SLNP, migration, I conducted interviews with community leaders in twenty-eight communities of SLNP settler origin.
Land Use Policy, 2020
Drug trafficking organizations are driving deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Drug traffickers deforest the protected area in order to illegally ranch cattle, which serves as a mechanism of money laundering, drug smuggling, and territory control. Journalists and ethnographers have analyzed "narco-cattle ranching" activities in the reserve and resulting "narco-deforestation," yet land use change scientists have yet to quantify the contribution of illegal cattle ranching to forest loss. This article uses remote sensing and GIS analysis to distinguish the relative contribution of cattle ranching, farming, and land speculation to reserve deforestation and other forms of land use and land cover change. We also use ethnographic methods to provide evidentiary links between illegal cattle ranching and drug trafficking activities that suggest a large part, but not all, of illegal cattle ranching is narco-capitalized. Our research finds that illegal cattle ranching is responsible for the majority of reserve deforestation, ranging from 59 to 87% of photographs on deforested lands in three sampled areas. We also found illegal cattle ranching activities are the highest in the reserve's western national parks, which should be strictly protected from land use change. Contrary to popular debate, these findings suggest drug traffickers in the context of the US-led War on Drugs are to blame for forest loss, not subsistence farmers illegally living in the reserve.