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.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to the anonymous reviewers and Billie Turner for comments that have improved this article. Thanks to Birgit Schmook and our research assistants for their contributions to our cooperative data collection effort. Funding for the research was provided by the Global Change Education Program (a program of the US Department of Energy), and the University of California’s Institute for Study of Mexico, and the United States. This research was conducted in cooperation with the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region project, which received core funding for NASA’s LCLUC program (NAG 56046, 511134, 06GD98G) and NSF’s BCS program (0410016). The project is indebted to assistance provided by our host institution in Mexico, El Colegiio de la Frontera Sur, especially Unidad Chetumal.
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Busch, C., Geoghegan, J. Labor scarcity as an underlying cause of the increasing prevalence of deforestation due to cattle pasture development in the southern Yucatán region. Reg Environ Change 10, 191–203 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-010-0110-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-010-0110-z