My colleague Doug Southgate and I released our book titled Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership are Saving Forests in Latin America through Stanford University Press in late 2024. We of course invite all of you to have a look. The book can be obtained through Stanford University Press, or Amazon. Additionally, Doug and I will be presenting a webinar on January 22, 2025.
We argue that forests in Latin America (and elsewhere) are at an inflection point because of trends in population, technology, and local ownership. All are bending in the right direction. For instance, growth in demand for food is slowing at the same time food production per hectare is hitting all-time highs. A key reason that food production has risen so much in Latin America is local ownership of farmland, which encourages investments in new technologies and higher yields. Local ownership – which includes individual ownership as well as community and Indigenous ownership – has also been expanding across the region’s forests, providing new opportunities for protection, planting, and natural regeneration.
In the book, we describe how we got to the point of converting 350 million treed hectares in Latin America (0.9 billion acres) to food production over the last 170 years. Population growth was the key driver. Human numbers increased from around 30 million in Latin America in 1850 to over 650 million today. Most of this increase happened because death rates fell as nutrition improved, medical advances occurred (including vaccines and antibiotics) and sanitation got better, among other things.
Today, population growth is slowing rapidly, not because calamity is upon us, as the authors of The Limits to Growth predicted in the early 1970s, but instead because people are controlling themselves. Just as birth rates fell years ago in Europe, North America, and other wealthy countries, they are now down across Latin America. As a result, the total fertility rate – the average number of children per woman – has fallen to 1.9, lower than the replacement rate. Population will continue to grow for a while in the region but is expected fall back nearly to today’s levels of 650 million by the end of the century.
Other factors contribute to deforestation, including government policies like open access, road building, and subsidies meant to expand agriculture and increase population in the hinterlands. Mining and logging play a role, but modestly in comparison.
As Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug showed us, adding land is not the only way to enhance food production. Increasing yields also works. Fittingly, the roots of the Green Revolution, which raised crop yields in developing countries last century, lie in Latin America.
Yes, nearly half of all tropical deforestation last century happened in Latin America, however, intensification reduced it. Since 1961, Brazil added 48 million hectares to corn and soybean production, an area bigger than the U.S. state of California. Yet if corn yields had not risen 268% and soybean yields 191%, Brazil would have needed 2.5 times that much land to produce the same quantity.
Because of intensification, real commodity prices for corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice have fallen since the 1960s. They are likely to fall further as slowing population growth meets new technology for food production.
As helpful as these trends are for slowing deforestation, they may not reverse it for the simple fact that government owns most of the forests in Latin America. In North America and Europe, governments do a great job of controlling access to public forests, although their management leaves substantial room for improvement. Through large swaths of government owned forests in Latin America, government agencies have trouble discouraging conversion to agriculture.
A well-recognized solution to de facto open access like this is ownership. Places like Chile and Costa Rica have developed land registries and encouraged individual land ownership, so deforestation has already reversed there. But thanks to Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, we have come to recognize that ownership can happen in lots of different ways, not just the fee simple ownership that many in North America and Europe are used to. When local ownership is considered broadly, it turns out that it is expanding across Latin America.
Early last century, land redistribution in Mexico created community forests called ejidos, which are well managed and resistant to deforestation. As a result, Mexico’s deforestation rate is low. Guatemala established several types of community forests in the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the late 1990s, which have become models for people all over the world. Deforestation rates within the community forests are slower than deforestation rates outside of them, and they are far slower than deforestation rates in some national parks in Guatemala. Brazil has been designating land in the Amazon for Indigenous communities as well, increasing local ownership and with it, opportunities for forest protection.
Ownership provides numerous benefits for forests. Although people do a better job maintaining forests when they have an ownership stake, carbon emissions and biodiversity losses are externalities, so even on locally owned land there will still be too much deforestation and too little afforestation. But private transactions – Payments for Environmental Services (PES) – can be deployed more effectively on private land. Nowadays, lots of companies are seeking opportunities to prevent forest loss or regenerate forests, and they prefer working with private owners than governments.
The evidence is pretty clear that forest planting is far more widespread on private land than public land. Natural regeneration is a perfectly valid way for forest renewal to proceed, but planting results in more stock more quickly. So from a carbon perspective, planting is beneficial.
When we look at the data and trends on people, technology, and ownership, Doug and I are incredibly optimistic about the future of forests in Latin America, and the entire world. Population and technology are heading in the right direction. In many places, the institutions of ownership are also heading in the right direction too, but now is a good time refocus our attention on local ownership, strengthening it where necessary.