Introduction for Reversing Deforestation

ONE

Better Years Ahead for Forests

Occupying nearly a third of the earth’s land surface,¹ forests yield building material, paper, fuel, and many other products. They also teem with flora and fauna and absorb carbon emitted by factories and vehicles powered by coal, natural gas, and petroleum. So for good reason, tree-covered habitats were high on the agenda in 1992, when the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro attracted national leaders by the score. Two global agreements were reached: the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, which provide guidance for measuring, monitoring, and governing forests.

Since the Earth Summit, the commitment to safeguard tree-covered habitats has been reaffirmed time after time. In 2021, for instance, representatives of 141 governments declared during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, that forest loss and land degradation should halt by 2030. Ambitious by any standard, this goal is to be achieved while simultaneously “delivering sustainable development and promoting an inclusive rural transformation.”²

This joint declaration was promising since its national sponsors had jurisdiction over 91 percent of the world’s forests.³ Yet unanimity was not achieved, with Bolivia and Venezuela among the countries that withheld support. Besides, some sponsors soon got cold feet. For example, Indonesian officials complained within days of the closing ceremony in Glasgow that curtailing forest loss by 2030 would be “inappropriate and unfair.”⁴

Moreover, paltry funding was offered for controlling forest fires, cracking down on illegal logging, and related efforts. The largest pledge was $2 billion from the Bezos Earth Trust, established by the founder of Amazon.com. Counting other private contributions of $5.2 billion as well as governmental funding, the total was no more than $20 billion.⁵ In contrast, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contends that ten times that amount must be spent annually on forests to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.⁶ The recurring expenditure the IPCC calls for could be a bargain given the trillions of dollars a year that carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services provided by forests are worth, according to Robert Costanza and other researchers.⁷

Perhaps the financial commitments made in Glasgow were limited because of free riding, with some donors holding back contributions in the hope that other donors would foot the bill for conservation. Worries about leakage, which arises when better habitat protection in one setting leads to more deforestation elsewhere, might also have discouraged contributions. But the most important reason why financial commitments did not exceed a one-time payment of $5.40 for each of the 3.7 billion hectares covered by the joint declaration relates to institutions of ownership. The problem is that ownership, which is a nonnegotiable prerequisite for conservation payments, is deficient—or absent entirely—in most parts of the world where forests are being lost.

More often than not, institutional shortcomings exist where governmental claims on natural resources are excessive. Claims that extend far and wide strain public-sector capabilities to undertake basic forest management, such as controlling resource use and investing in environmental renewal. Likewise, many governments with extensive inventories of forests lack the capacity to fulfill a fundamental responsibility of ownership, which is to regulate access. Where loggers, agricultural settlers, and other interlopers can get away with ignoring the boundaries of public holdings, environmental deterioration is unavoidable.

Strengthening ownership, especially if it is local, is the best way to reduce the environmental damage resulting from natural resources that are free for the taking. Once communities and individuals have property rights in the forests around them, payments for ecosystem services can be contemplated. But even with no such payments, environmental quality improves since local owners are able to benefit from the effort and money they devote to conservation.

A great restoration of privately owned forests was set in motion decades ago in affluent parts of the world. This restoration has been sustained as population growth has slowed and agricultural productivity has surged from Europe to the United States to New Zealand. At the turn of the twenty-first century, early signs were reported in Foreign Affairs of a similar transition from deforestation to habitat recovery in the Global South, as developing countries as a group are called.⁸ In this book, we examine how demographic and technological forces at work in the food economy can combine with property rights that are well defined and reliably enforced to save habitats throughout Latin America.

Equal to the birth rate minus the death rate, natural increase always occurs during demographic transition. This increase is not a consequence of a sustained rise in the birth rate, as would result from lasting gains in human fertility (defined as the expected number of births per woman). Instead, the birth rate and the death rate usually diverge due to an escape from premature mortality, which drives down the death rate. As Robert Fogel (a Nobel laureate in economics) observed, this escape is the fortunate outcome of another transition, which is epidemiological.⁹ Prior to this advance in human well-being, most deaths are caused by infectious diseases, all too often among infants and small children. But once epidemiological transition begins, the incidence of fatal infection declines. More people die from noncommunicable illnesses—generally not at a young age, so life expectancy at birth improves, the death rate declines, and there is more natural increase.¹⁰

Along with other developing regions, Latin America made an extraordinary escape during the twentieth century from premature mortality, which caused death rates to fall far below birth rates. During the 1960s and 1970s, few believed that human fertility and birth rates would decline enough so a devastating collapse in the population and living standards could be avoided. To the contrary, humankind appeared to be reproducing its way to catastrophe.

This outcome was the subject of an influential volume published in 1972, two decades before the Earth Summit. Readers of The Limits to Growth were told that, with no change in the demographic and economic trends that prevailed at the time, agricultural and industrial output per capita would plunge around the turn of the twenty-first century. As a result of cumulative resource depletion, average food intake would then fall back to levels last observed during the 1800s; before too long, hundreds of millions of people would perish.¹¹ Donella H. Meadows and her coauthors also declared that any measure aside from the speediest possible alignment of births with deaths would be futile—postponing demographic and economic collapse, not preventing it. Little was to be gained by halting the loss of farmland due to urban sprawl and soil erosion, for instance. Nor would advances in agricultural productivity rescue humankind.¹²

Other predictions offered in The Limits to Growth were even more dreadful. For example, Meadows et al. expected additional contaminants spewed into the environment as economic activity proliferated to result in pervasive human mortality, which would ease pressure on natural resources. Absent negative feedbacks of this sort, prolonging unsustainable growth in human numbers for a few more years would set the stage for a deeper crash, one that would leave the surviving population with fewer resources and therefore more miserable than it would have been had demographic expansion ended earlier. If catastrophe was to be avoided, that expansion simply had to stop.¹³

The Limits to Growth provided few insights into accomplishing this feat, although a respected biologist had shared an idea or two four years earlier. In a 1968 book with a title ominous enough to delight any publisher’s marketing department, Paul Ehrlich stated that individuals’ freedom to have children might have to be abridged. Better, he advised in The Population Bomb, for governments to add contraceptives to water supplies as a prelude to rationing antidotes “carefully” so as “to produce the desired population size.”¹⁴ He also speculated that some countries might have to be abandoned to their fates so there would be enough food aid for others that might be saved. For example, Ehrlich considered India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to be hopeless cases, but hesitated to write off present-day Pakistan after commending national authorities’ promotion of birth control there.¹⁵

Proposals such as these have not been debated seriously in Latin America given that human fertility in the region has declined enough to astonish the experts. Even though the use of contraceptives has not been mandated anywhere, the average number of births per Latin American female fell by almost half between 1960 and 1990, from nearly six to a little more than three. A reduction of another 40 percent, to two births per woman, occurred during the next three decades. Greater than 2 percent not so long ago, annual natural increase is barely 1 percent today and is projected to reach 0 percent in less than forty years. After zero population growth is achieved, human numbers will go down in Latin America.

The challenge of sustaining broad-based improvements in living standards has been addressed by economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James A. Robinson. In Why Nations Fail, published in 2012, the two scholars made a compelling case that economic performance hinges on the rules, norms, and other institutions that govern individuals’ dealings with one another. The ideal institutional arrangement is inclusivity, which fosters productive entrepreneurship and innovation and which exists insofar as everyone’s property rights are respected, the enforcement of contracts is evenhanded, and governmental corruption is in check. But institutions can be extractive instead, designed for the exploitation of the disenfranchised majority of a population by a privileged minority and responsible for economic stagnation and widespread poverty.¹⁶

Few countries have inclusive arrangements across the board, especially in the Global South. Chile has been a prominent exception. Two years before the publication of Why Nations Fail, Sebastian Edwards argued that economic progress in the Southern Cone nation owes much to the rule of law, the control of corruption, and regulatory transparency. An incisive chronicler of Latin America’s woes, he also noted encouraging developments elsewhere in the region, although none of Chile’s neighbors could match its institutional reforms or its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.¹⁷

Agreeing entirely with Edwards’s assessment, Acemoglu and Robinson opened their 2012 book with a stark example of the impact of chronic institutional deficiencies in Latin America. The example has to do with the city of Nogales, part of which is in the U.S. state of Arizona while the rest is in the Mexican state of Sonora. All of Nogales’s inhabitants “share ancestors, enjoy the same food and the same music, and have . . . the same ‘culture.’” Regardless, average incomes north of the border are three times what they are a few kilometers away in Mexico. As far as the authors of Why Nations Fail are concerned, there is no reason for a gap this wide other than extractive arrangements south of the border.¹⁸

Institutional deficiencies notwithstanding, the food economy has undergone a profound transformation in Latin America. Private investment by foreign businesses and domestic firms alike has occurred in part because of the concentration of many consumers with purchasing power in urban areas. Additionally, markets have been deregulated, state-owned enterprises have been privatized, and other reforms have been implemented during the past four decades. Developing nations south of the United States now have products and marketing outlets that differ little from what wealthy nations have.¹⁹ Some of the consequences of this change have been unfortunate, such as a higher incidence of obesity. Still, the region has made progress toward greater food security.

International trade also has contributed much to the development of Latin American agriculture. The sector has enjoyed a comparative advantage in sugar and coffee for centuries. Advances in transportation and refrigeration facilitated overseas sales of grain, bananas, and beef beginning in the 1800s. More recently, opportunities have opened up to export soybeans and other farm goods, including to growing economies in Asia.

Mechanical-engineering improvements—as they were called by Vernon Ruttan, an authority on technological change and agricultural development²⁰—often add to food production by furthering the territorial spread of agriculture, particularly in areas where farming with old technology was difficult. During the early Middle Ages, for instance, few crops were harvested north of the Loire River because wooden plows, which had been used since Roman times to cultivate gravelly land around the Mediterranean Sea, could not turn over the heavy soils of northern France, Germany, and the Low Countries. Starting in the eleventh century, though, a switch was made to a more powerful tillage system, one that hitched large “stall-fed oxen” and “dray horses” to plows with “deep cutting iron share(s).” Following this switch, the northern frontier of European agriculture advanced rapidly, usually into forests. Human numbers also increased, both before and after bubonic plague wreaked demographic havoc during the 1300s.²¹

During the nineteenth century, U.S. and Canadian farmers relied on better plows, new reapers, and other mechanical-engineering advances as they pushed across North America. Similar developments, which increased the productivity of agricultural labor by enabling rural households to farm larger holdings on their own, soon followed in Latin America, in Argentina and Uruguay for example. But since the middle of the twentieth century, biological-chemical innovations, as Ruttan described them, have been more important.²² The Green Revolution boosted grain yields, which has been earthshaking for two reasons. First, grain accounts for more than half of everything people eat, including indirect consumption of grains on which chicken, swine, and other livestock feed as well as direct consumption of rice, bread, and other cereal products.²³ Second, hectares planted to crops such as maize and wheat exceed the area planted to all other nonindustrial crops combined.²⁴ Additional increases in output per hectare have been achieved as biotechnology has been harnessed in the food economy. During the past fifteen years, Argentina and Brazil have cemented their standing as agricultural powerhouses due largely to the wholesale adoption of genetically modified varieties. With yield growth accelerating in each of the two countries, exports of grain and soybeans have boomed; output and overseas shipments have gone up much faster than hectares planted to those crops.

Argentina’s and Brazil’s experience exemplifies what Andrew McAfee, the cofounder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, has written concerning biological-chemical improvements. Those improvements allow people to eat more, McAfee states, primarily because most of the cost savings that result from technological innovation accrue to consumers, in the former of lower prices.²⁵

Among the first scholars to identify the transition from the predominance of deforestation to the predominance of reforestation was Alexander S. Mather, a geographer. Having examined trends during the late 1900s in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, Mather argued that slower population growth, higher incomes, and overall economic development can all result in an expansion of tree cover.²⁷ The same causal factors have had similar environmental consequences in other affluent settings. Forests started to come back long ago in the northeastern United States, for instance, as agriculture declined. Around the Great Lakes, intensive logging by timber barons like Frederick Weyerhaeuser coincided with expanded crop and livestock production during the nineteenth century. But by the early 1900s, Weyerhaeuser had moved west to the state of Washington and forest transition was underway in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Just as mechanical-engineering advances in agriculture encouraged deforestation in the United States during the 1800s and north of the Loire River hundreds of years earlier, similar advances have contributed to deforestation in Latin America by allowing crop and livestock producers to colonize places they used to avoid. Farms and ranches have also displaced forests because governments constructed roads and encouraged settlement in remote settings. However, reduced population growth combined with yield-enhancing improvements in agricultural technology have set the stage for forest recovery.

Shifting market forces and technological innovation in the forestry sector are reinforcing this recovery. Inflation-adjusted timber prices rose in the United States for one hundred years beginning in the late 1800s as the stock of older, larger trees declined, initially in the eastern portion of the country and later in the West. During the twentieth century, tree planting emerged as an alternative to the cutting of old-growth forests.²⁸ Though less widely recognized than technological improvement in agriculture, advances in production forestry have greatly increased timber yields. With plantations of pine, eucalyptus, and other species now competing for land against farms and ranches in Chile, Brazil, and other countries, tree cover is on the rise in many places.

Not just a prerequisite for economic progress, in general, institutional inclusivity enables forest transition. In much of Europe, private landownership is the prevailing arrangement, so individuals and firms have the legal standing they need for economically efficient development of natural resources.²⁹ East of the Mississippi River in the United States, most real estate has long been in the hands of people with secure property rights. Thus, reforestation has occurred as prices of farm products have fallen in response to increased agricultural productivity and as the market value of timber has risen due to the depletion of old-growth forests. Nowadays, the domestic wood supply comes mainly from private holdings, even though millions of tree-covered hectares still belong to federal, state, and local governments.

In Chile and Costa Rica, diminished growth in human numbers and food demand, higher agricultural yields, and local ownership have combined to initiate a forest transition. Private ownership underpins the same transition in Brazil, where timber plantations and other forests are expanding in some parts of the country even as tree cover continues to be lost in the Amazon Basin. Elsewhere in Latin America, institutions are becoming more inclusive as governments recognize and protect common properties—which increased from 186 million hectares in 2002 to 291 million hectares in 2017.³⁰ Economic research shows that assigning natural resources to indigenous communities or other well-defined groups that take responsibility for determining when and how members use collective holdings helps to preserve natural habitats.³¹ Like individual ownership, common property is superior to the absence of resource rights, including the effective lack of ownership that does untold environmental damage to many public forests where private access is unimpeded.

One of these services is the harboring of biological diversity, which is particularly important where habitat destruction has reached an advanced cumulative stage. As Edward O. Wilson (hailed during his lifetime as the “father of biodiversity”) and Robert H. MacArthur reported in a 1967 book, The Theory of Island Biogeography, there is a direct relationship between the number of species found in a terrestrial habitat and its area (measured in hectares).³² Destroying half of a habitat, for example, reduces its species count by 13 percent. Likewise, the estimated extinction rate in Latin America’s forests has averaged 0.13 percent a year, given that tree cover has receded at an annual rate of 0.50 percent in recent decades.³³

In one of many applications of the theory of island biogeography, Norman Myers and four other ecologists identified “hotspots” around the world where terrestrial biodiversity is in jeopardy. Habitat destruction is severe in each hotspot, where large numbers of plant and vertebrate species are still found and which has exceptional floral and faunal endemism. Some of these areas are insular: Madagascar and the Philippines, for example. Others, such as the littoral forests of West Africa, are nearly so—hemmed in on one side by salt water and on the other side by lands that are inhospitable to hotspots’ endemic plants and animals.³⁴

Hotspots are plentiful in Latin America. Central Chile, which has a Mediterranean climate, made Myers et al.’s revised list, which was published in 2000. The tropical portion of the Andes Mountains, from the Altiplano of Bolivia up through Peru and Ecuador to northern Colombia, is also on the list. Remnants of rain forests that used to extend without interruption from western Ecuador through the Chocó of western Colombia and into the Darién region of eastern Panama comprise another hotspot. So do Meso America, from western Panama well up into Mexico, as well as the Caribbean, which includes southern Florida and all the Greater and Lesser Antilles. Brazil has a pair of hotspots. One is the Cerrado, which includes extensive wetlands. The other consists of what remains of the country’s Atlantic Coast forests. The Brazilian Amazon is not on Myers et al.’s list since so much of that area remains undisturbed.³⁵

Myers et al. offered no economic analysis. Nor have others with knowledge of biodiverse habitats under serious threat.³⁶ But economists who examine biodiversity have estimated a wide range of values. Detailed analysis of the economic contribution that specimens collected in the wild make to pharmaceutical research suggests that habitat destruction costs no more than $40 a hectare in any of the hotspots identified by Myers et al.³⁷ If other benefits are considered along with pharmaceutical innovation, however, the economic impact of destroying species-rich forests in Latin America is estimated to be considerably higher, perhaps as much as $717 a hectare.³⁸

Even this maximum estimate pales in comparison to the value of carbon sequestration. Every year, 5.9 billion tons of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere as 7 million hectares of tropical forests are cut over and converted to other land uses.³⁹ These emissions can be valued by applying an estimate of monetary damages per ton of CO₂ emissions, commonly referred to as the social cost of carbon. While some economists contend that this social cost is as high as $200,⁴⁰ William Nordhaus, whose economic analysis of climate change won him a Nobel Prize in 2018, finds that emitting a ton of CO₂ creates damages worth $53.⁴¹ Given this estimate as well as mean emissions of 419 tons a hectare,⁴² the social cost of deforestation in South America averages $22,207 a hectare, absent consideration of the carbon that would be captured in the future if trees remained in place and continued to grow. Also according to Nordhaus, the 2.2 billion net tons of CO₂ absorbed every year by tropical forests plus net annual sequestration of 4.4 billion tons by forests farther from the equator are worth $350 billion.⁴³

*   *   *

Determining the value of ecosystem services provided by tree-covered habitats is one thing. Implementing policies that oblige economic actors to factor that value into their decision making is something else. Various approaches have been employed, including the establishment of protected areas and timber concessions. In Brazil, regulation of activities such as land clearing and road construction along with commitments agribusinesses made not to purchase soybeans and other commodities harvested in recently deforested areas slowed habitat destruction after the turn of the twenty-first century.⁴⁴ In contrast, secure resource ownership has resulted in the capture of environmental values in Chile and Costa Rica. The Central American nation, in particular, has been able to make payments for environmental services (PES) the linchpin of its conservation strategy because private property rights are ubiquitous. While these payments could perhaps be distributed more effectively,⁴⁵ their contribution to forest recovery is undeniable.⁴⁶

Satisfying the institutional prerequisites of habitat conservation is always a challenge. Even in a country as small as Costa Rica, surveying and registering everyone’s property takes years as well as a sizable monetary outlay. Also, Brazilian experience after 2012, when forestry legislation was amended so as to facilitate private ownership of more tree-covered land, demonstrates that many individuals with new titles choose to clear at least some of their holdings.⁴⁶

But the fact remains that the environment suffers where institutional prerequisites remain unsatisfied—as demonstrated by the shortcomings of PES, on which $500 to $700 million a year have been spent around the world since the turn of the twenty-first century.⁴⁸ In 2007, a new PES initiative—Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+)—was launched at the United Nations Climate Conference in Bali. Funded generously from the start by Norway, REDD+ provided a way for affluent nations to pay for the protection of threatened habitats in developing countries.⁴⁹ However, the environmental benefits have been disappointing—largely because REDD+ monies flow through governments, which has limited the payments local people receive in return for the conservation measures they apply.⁵⁰

Whether or not the threat to tree-covered habitats is imminent, climate change has had important consequences in Latin America. As in other parts of the world, warmer temperatures are allowing forests to move up the sides of mountains.⁵⁶ Trees are also encroaching on the Brazilian Cerrado and other savannas where rainfall has increased.⁵⁷ More broadly, greater concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere have elevated the capacity of all forests for carbon absorption.⁵⁸ This benefit is especially pronounced in the low latitudes and explains why net carbon sequestration has increased in Latin America’s forests despite large-scale habitat destruction.⁵⁹ Accelerated productivity, however, can cause inadvertent problems, such as faster growth of lianas, which can do much harm to trees during logging operations.⁶⁰

The risks posed by climate change turn out to be acute in parks and other protected areas, which amount to 267 million hectares in Latin America.⁶¹ Simply outlawing agriculture, timber extraction, and other development on all those hectares is an inadequate response to ecological change expected to result from anticipated swings in temperatures and precipitation.⁶² To arrest the extinction of plant and animal species, adaptive management is needed. But management, adaptive or otherwise, is missing from most protected areas. Establishing new parks without investing in management has the potential to compound the harm done by climate change.

Of course, adaptation to climate change is unlikely where protected areas are not really protected. If forest fires become more frequent, as predicted by some models,⁶³ farmers and ranchers can be expected to encroach more on tree-covered habitats where state claims on natural resources outstrip governmental capabilities to police access. In contrast, individuals and communities that have property rights have at least some incentive to regenerate forests or perhaps try novel species better suited to new climatic conditions.⁶⁴ Thus, adaptation to climate change, which will have a sizable pay-off in the years to come, has institutional prerequisites.

This book’s examination of forest transition begins in the second chapter with a survey of the demand side of the food economy. Special attention is paid to demographic transition, which got underway in some parts of Latin America during the 1800s, and to the institutional realities that have shaped the economies of Brazil, Peru, and their neighbors. Also discussed is transformation of food-related industries in the region since the 1980s.

The supply side of the food economy is the subject of the third chapter. The Green Revolution and subsequent advances resulting from the application of biotechnology to grain production are a primary focus. These developments have boosted output while arresting the geographic expansion of agriculture in Latin America no less than in other parts of the world. As documented elsewhere in this book, similar developments have benefited the banana industry, livestock producers, and other subsectors.

Examined in the fourth chapter are forest loss, gross deforestation, and net deforestation, which peaked globally during the 1930s. Long-term outcomes in Latin America are related to demographic trends, economic growth, resource use and extraction, infrastructure expansion, and the evolution of property rights. While deforestation has slowed in Brazil and other countries since the turn of the twenty-first century, additional deceleration depends on the continued strengthening of forest ownership.

Forest recovery is the subject of the fifth chapter. In the United States, reforestation has resulted from slower population growth and improved agricultural technology combined with rising prices for wood. The same process began earlier in Europe and more recently in Chile, Costa Rica, and some parts of Brazil. Although tree planting has become an indispensable tool of forest renewal, natural regeneration is happening throughout tropical Latin America, ensuring that not all forest loss becomes net deforestation. Market forces are an underestimated contributor to forest renewal. Institutions are also an important factor.

Specific initiatives aimed at reducing the environmental harm of logging, making better use of nontimber products harvested in forests, and applying PES are examined in the sixth chapter. Local ownership has been essential for the success of each of these initiatives.

Ecosystem services provided by forests such as biodiversity protection and carbon sequestration are immensely valuable. Unfortunately, market actors do not give environmental values full weight, so there is too much deforestation and too little reforestation even if natural resources belong to individuals and communities. As explained in the seventh chapter, conservation payments, which are possible with property rights, are an effective remedy.

Climate change already has affected forests in Latin America and throughout the world. Evidence presented in the eighth chapter suggests that forests are not under imminent threat from climate change and that the clearing of forests remains a far more serious problem. Similar policy advice can be given both for climate change and for deforestation. That is, private landowners are more likely than state agencies to adapt successfully to changing environmental conditions. Efforts by international organizations such as the United Nations to protect forests are reviewed as well.

Finally, the future transition of Latin America’s forests is outlined in the ninth chapter, with particular attention paid to demographic, economic, agricultural, and institutional developments in the years to come. Along with trends on the horizon in the forestry sector, these developments all point to a continuing recovery of tree-covered habitats.

Notes

1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

2. United Nations.

3. Ibid.

4. Reuters (2021).

5. Colchester.

6. IPCC, chapter 7.

7. Costanza et al.

8. Victor and Ausubel.

9. Fogel.

10. Omran.

11. Meadows et al., 124.

12. Ibid., 48–54.

13. Ibid., 158–63.

14. Ehrlich, 135.

15. Ibid., 160.

16. Acemoglu and Robinson, 42–44.

17. Edwards, 117–21.

18. Acemoglu and Robinson, 7–9.

19. Popkin and Reardon.

20. Ruttan.

21. Landes, 41.

22. Ruttan.

23. Southgate, Graham, and Tweeten, 259–62.

24. Ibid., 64–65.

25. McAfee, 23–24.

26. Mendelsohn and Sohngen.

27. Mather.

28. Mendelsohn and Sohngen.

29. Bohn and Deacon.

30. Rights and Resources Initiative.

31. Fortmann et al.

32. MacArthur and Wilson, 8.

33. FAO (2020).

34. Myers et al.

35. Ibid.

36. Mittermeier et al.

37. Simpson, Sedjo, and Reid.

38. Siikamäki et al.

39. Friedlingstein et al.

40. Rennert et al.

41. Barrage and Nordhaus.

42. FAO (2020).

43. Harris et al.

44. Nepstad et al. (2014).

45. Robalino and Pfaff.

46. Murguia et al.

47. Freitas et al.

48. IPCC, chapter 7.

49. Salzman et al.

50. Luttrell et al.

51. Lovejoy and Nobre (2018).

52. Boulton et al.

53. Hubau et al.

54. Albert et al.

55. Parmesan et al.

56. Moret et al.

57. Criado et al.

58. Friedlingstein et al.

59. Harris et al.

60. Reis et al.

61. FAO (2020).

62. Hoffman et al.

63. Kim et al.

64. Tian et al. (2016); Tian et al. (2018); Favero et al. (2022).

ONE

Better Years Ahead for Forests

Occupying nearly a third of the earth’s land surface,¹ forests yield building material, paper, fuel, and many other products. They also teem with flora and fauna and absorb carbon emitted by factories and vehicles powered by coal, natural gas, and petroleum. So for good reason, tree-covered habitats were high on the agenda in 1992, when the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro attracted national leaders by the score. Two global agreements were reached: the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, which provide guidance for measuring, monitoring, and governing forests.

Since the Earth Summit, the commitment to safeguard tree-covered habitats has been reaffirmed time after time. In 2021, for instance, representatives of 141 governments declared during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, that forest loss and land degradation should halt by 2030. Ambitious by any standard, this goal is to be achieved while simultaneously “delivering sustainable development and promoting an inclusive rural transformation.”²

This joint declaration was promising since its national sponsors had jurisdiction over 91 percent of the world’s forests.³ Yet unanimity was not achieved, with Bolivia and Venezuela among the countries that withheld support. Besides, some sponsors soon got cold feet. For example, Indonesian officials complained within days of the closing ceremony in Glasgow that curtailing forest loss by 2030 would be “inappropriate and unfair.”⁴

Moreover, paltry funding was offered for controlling forest fires, cracking down on illegal logging, and related efforts. The largest pledge was $2 billion from the Bezos Earth Trust, established by the founder of Amazon.com. Counting other private contributions of $5.2 billion as well as governmental funding, the total was no more than $20 billion.⁵ In contrast, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contends that ten times that amount must be spent annually on forests to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.⁶ The recurring expenditure the IPCC calls for could be a bargain given the trillions of dollars a year that carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services provided by forests are worth, according to Robert Costanza and other researchers.⁷

Perhaps the financial commitments made in Glasgow were limited because of free riding, with some donors holding back contributions in the hope that other donors would foot the bill for conservation. Worries about leakage, which arises when better habitat protection in one setting leads to more deforestation elsewhere, might also have discouraged contributions. But the most important reason why financial commitments did not exceed a one-time payment of $5.40 for each of the 3.7 billion hectares covered by the joint declaration relates to institutions of ownership. The problem is that ownership, which is a nonnegotiable prerequisite for conservation payments, is deficient—or absent entirely—in most parts of the world where forests are being lost.

More often than not, institutional shortcomings exist where governmental claims on natural resources are excessive. Claims that extend far and wide strain public-sector capabilities to undertake basic forest management, such as controlling resource use and investing in environmental renewal. Likewise, many governments with extensive inventories of forests lack the capacity to fulfill a fundamental responsibility of ownership, which is to regulate access. Where loggers, agricultural settlers, and other interlopers can get away with ignoring the boundaries of public holdings, environmental deterioration is unavoidable.

Strengthening ownership, especially if it is local, is the best way to reduce the environmental damage resulting from natural resources that are free for the taking. Once communities and individuals have property rights in the forests around them, payments for ecosystem services can be contemplated. But even with no such payments, environmental quality improves since local owners are able to benefit from the effort and money they devote to conservation.

A great restoration of privately owned forests was set in motion decades ago in affluent parts of the world. This restoration has been sustained as population growth has slowed and agricultural productivity has surged from Europe to the United States to New Zealand. At the turn of the twenty-first century, early signs were reported in Foreign Affairs of a similar transition from deforestation to habitat recovery in the Global South, as developing countries as a group are called.⁸ In this book, we examine how demographic and technological forces at work in the food economy can combine with property rights that are well defined and reliably enforced to save habitats throughout Latin America.

Equal to the birth rate minus the death rate, natural increase always occurs during demographic transition. This increase is not a consequence of a sustained rise in the birth rate, as would result from lasting gains in human fertility (defined as the expected number of births per woman). Instead, the birth rate and the death rate usually diverge due to an escape from premature mortality, which drives down the death rate. As Robert Fogel (a Nobel laureate in economics) observed, this escape is the fortunate outcome of another transition, which is epidemiological.⁹ Prior to this advance in human well-being, most deaths are caused by infectious diseases, all too often among infants and small children. But once epidemiological transition begins, the incidence of fatal infection declines. More people die from noncommunicable illnesses—generally not at a young age, so life expectancy at birth improves, the death rate declines, and there is more natural increase.¹⁰

Along with other developing regions, Latin America made an extraordinary escape during the twentieth century from premature mortality, which caused death rates to fall far below birth rates. During the 1960s and 1970s, few believed that human fertility and birth rates would decline enough so a devastating collapse in the population and living standards could be avoided. To the contrary, humankind appeared to be reproducing its way to catastrophe.

This outcome was the subject of an influential volume published in 1972, two decades before the Earth Summit. Readers of The Limits to Growth were told that, with no change in the demographic and economic trends that prevailed at the time, agricultural and industrial output per capita would plunge around the turn of the twenty-first century. As a result of cumulative resource depletion, average food intake would then fall back to levels last observed during the 1800s; before too long, hundreds of millions of people would perish.¹¹ Donella H. Meadows and her coauthors also declared that any measure aside from the speediest possible alignment of births with deaths would be futile—postponing demographic and economic collapse, not preventing it. Little was to be gained by halting the loss of farmland due to urban sprawl and soil erosion, for instance. Nor would advances in agricultural productivity rescue humankind.¹²

Other predictions offered in The Limits to Growth were even more dreadful. For example, Meadows et al. expected additional contaminants spewed into the environment as economic activity proliferated to result in pervasive human mortality, which would ease pressure on natural resources. Absent negative feedbacks of this sort, prolonging unsustainable growth in human numbers for a few more years would set the stage for a deeper crash, one that would leave the surviving population with fewer resources and therefore more miserable than it would have been had demographic expansion ended earlier. If catastrophe was to be avoided, that expansion simply had to stop.¹³

The Limits to Growth provided few insights into accomplishing this feat, although a respected biologist had shared an idea or two four years earlier. In a 1968 book with a title ominous enough to delight any publisher’s marketing department, Paul Ehrlich stated that individuals’ freedom to have children might have to be abridged. Better, he advised in The Population Bomb, for governments to add contraceptives to water supplies as a prelude to rationing antidotes “carefully” so as “to produce the desired population size.”¹⁴ He also speculated that some countries might have to be abandoned to their fates so there would be enough food aid for others that might be saved. For example, Ehrlich considered India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to be hopeless cases, but hesitated to write off present-day Pakistan after commending national authorities’ promotion of birth control there.¹⁵

Proposals such as these have not been debated seriously in Latin America given that human fertility in the region has declined enough to astonish the experts. Even though the use of contraceptives has not been mandated anywhere, the average number of births per Latin American female fell by almost half between 1960 and 1990, from nearly six to a little more than three. A reduction of another 40 percent, to two births per woman, occurred during the next three decades. Greater than 2 percent not so long ago, annual natural increase is barely 1 percent today and is projected to reach 0 percent in less than forty years. After zero population growth is achieved, human numbers will go down in Latin America.

The challenge of sustaining broad-based improvements in living standards has been addressed by economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James A. Robinson. In Why Nations Fail, published in 2012, the two scholars made a compelling case that economic performance hinges on the rules, norms, and other institutions that govern individuals’ dealings with one another. The ideal institutional arrangement is inclusivity, which fosters productive entrepreneurship and innovation and which exists insofar as everyone’s property rights are respected, the enforcement of contracts is evenhanded, and governmental corruption is in check. But institutions can be extractive instead, designed for the exploitation of the disenfranchised majority of a population by a privileged minority and responsible for economic stagnation and widespread poverty.¹⁶

Few countries have inclusive arrangements across the board, especially in the Global South. Chile has been a prominent exception. Two years before the publication of Why Nations Fail, Sebastian Edwards argued that economic progress in the Southern Cone nation owes much to the rule of law, the control of corruption, and regulatory transparency. An incisive chronicler of Latin America’s woes, he also noted encouraging developments elsewhere in the region, although none of Chile’s neighbors could match its institutional reforms or its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.¹⁷

Agreeing entirely with Edwards’s assessment, Acemoglu and Robinson opened their 2012 book with a stark example of the impact of chronic institutional deficiencies in Latin America. The example has to do with the city of Nogales, part of which is in the U.S. state of Arizona while the rest is in the Mexican state of Sonora. All of Nogales’s inhabitants “share ancestors, enjoy the same food and the same music, and have . . . the same ‘culture.’” Regardless, average incomes north of the border are three times what they are a few kilometers away in Mexico. As far as the authors of Why Nations Fail are concerned, there is no reason for a gap this wide other than extractive arrangements south of the border.¹⁸

Institutional deficiencies notwithstanding, the food economy has undergone a profound transformation in Latin America. Private investment by foreign businesses and domestic firms alike has occurred in part because of the concentration of many consumers with purchasing power in urban areas. Additionally, markets have been deregulated, state-owned enterprises have been privatized, and other reforms have been implemented during the past four decades. Developing nations south of the United States now have products and marketing outlets that differ little from what wealthy nations have.¹⁹ Some of the consequences of this change have been unfortunate, such as a higher incidence of obesity. Still, the region has made progress toward greater food security.

International trade also has contributed much to the development of Latin American agriculture. The sector has enjoyed a comparative advantage in sugar and coffee for centuries. Advances in transportation and refrigeration facilitated overseas sales of grain, bananas, and beef beginning in the 1800s. More recently, opportunities have opened up to export soybeans and other farm goods, including to growing economies in Asia.

Mechanical-engineering improvements—as they were called by Vernon Ruttan, an authority on technological change and agricultural development²⁰—often add to food production by furthering the territorial spread of agriculture, particularly in areas where farming with old technology was difficult. During the early Middle Ages, for instance, few crops were harvested north of the Loire River because wooden plows, which had been used since Roman times to cultivate gravelly land around the Mediterranean Sea, could not turn over the heavy soils of northern France, Germany, and the Low Countries. Starting in the eleventh century, though, a switch was made to a more powerful tillage system, one that hitched large “stall-fed oxen” and “dray horses” to plows with “deep cutting iron share(s).” Following this switch, the northern frontier of European agriculture advanced rapidly, usually into forests. Human numbers also increased, both before and after bubonic plague wreaked demographic havoc during the 1300s.²¹

During the nineteenth century, U.S. and Canadian farmers relied on better plows, new reapers, and other mechanical-engineering advances as they pushed across North America. Similar developments, which increased the productivity of agricultural labor by enabling rural households to farm larger holdings on their own, soon followed in Latin America, in Argentina and Uruguay for example. But since the middle of the twentieth century, biological-chemical innovations, as Ruttan described them, have been more important.²² The Green Revolution boosted grain yields, which has been earthshaking for two reasons. First, grain accounts for more than half of everything people eat, including indirect consumption of grains on which chicken, swine, and other livestock feed as well as direct consumption of rice, bread, and other cereal products.²³ Second, hectares planted to crops such as maize and wheat exceed the area planted to all other nonindustrial crops combined.²⁴ Additional increases in output per hectare have been achieved as biotechnology has been harnessed in the food economy. During the past fifteen years, Argentina and Brazil have cemented their standing as agricultural powerhouses due largely to the wholesale adoption of genetically modified varieties. With yield growth accelerating in each of the two countries, exports of grain and soybeans have boomed; output and overseas shipments have gone up much faster than hectares planted to those crops.

Argentina’s and Brazil’s experience exemplifies what Andrew McAfee, the cofounder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, has written concerning biological-chemical improvements. Those improvements allow people to eat more, McAfee states, primarily because most of the cost savings that result from technological innovation accrue to consumers, in the former of lower prices.²⁵

Among the first scholars to identify the transition from the predominance of deforestation to the predominance of reforestation was Alexander S. Mather, a geographer. Having examined trends during the late 1900s in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, Mather argued that slower population growth, higher incomes, and overall economic development can all result in an expansion of tree cover.²⁷ The same causal factors have had similar environmental consequences in other affluent settings. Forests started to come back long ago in the northeastern United States, for instance, as agriculture declined. Around the Great Lakes, intensive logging by timber barons like Frederick Weyerhaeuser coincided with expanded crop and livestock production during the nineteenth century. But by the early 1900s, Weyerhaeuser had moved west to the state of Washington and forest transition was underway in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Just as mechanical-engineering advances in agriculture encouraged deforestation in the United States during the 1800s and north of the Loire River hundreds of years earlier, similar advances have contributed to deforestation in Latin America by allowing crop and livestock producers to colonize places they used to avoid. Farms and ranches have also displaced forests because governments constructed roads and encouraged settlement in remote settings. However, reduced population growth combined with yield-enhancing improvements in agricultural technology have set the stage for forest recovery.

Shifting market forces and technological innovation in the forestry sector are reinforcing this recovery. Inflation-adjusted timber prices rose in the United States for one hundred years beginning in the late 1800s as the stock of older, larger trees declined, initially in the eastern portion of the country and later in the West. During the twentieth century, tree planting emerged as an alternative to the cutting of old-growth forests.²⁸ Though less widely recognized than technological improvement in agriculture, advances in production forestry have greatly increased timber yields. With plantations of pine, eucalyptus, and other species now competing for land against farms and ranches in Chile, Brazil, and other countries, tree cover is on the rise in many places.

Not just a prerequisite for economic progress, in general, institutional inclusivity enables forest transition. In much of Europe, private landownership is the prevailing arrangement, so individuals and firms have the legal standing they need for economically efficient development of natural resources.²⁹ East of the Mississippi River in the United States, most real estate has long been in the hands of people with secure property rights. Thus, reforestation has occurred as prices of farm products have fallen in response to increased agricultural productivity and as the market value of timber has risen due to the depletion of old-growth forests. Nowadays, the domestic wood supply comes mainly from private holdings, even though millions of tree-covered hectares still belong to federal, state, and local governments.

In Chile and Costa Rica, diminished growth in human numbers and food demand, higher agricultural yields, and local ownership have combined to initiate a forest transition. Private ownership underpins the same transition in Brazil, where timber plantations and other forests are expanding in some parts of the country even as tree cover continues to be lost in the Amazon Basin. Elsewhere in Latin America, institutions are becoming more inclusive as governments recognize and protect common properties—which increased from 186 million hectares in 2002 to 291 million hectares in 2017.³⁰ Economic research shows that assigning natural resources to indigenous communities or other well-defined groups that take responsibility for determining when and how members use collective holdings helps to preserve natural habitats.³¹ Like individual ownership, common property is superior to the absence of resource rights, including the effective lack of ownership that does untold environmental damage to many public forests where private access is unimpeded.

One of these services is the harboring of biological diversity, which is particularly important where habitat destruction has reached an advanced cumulative stage. As Edward O. Wilson (hailed during his lifetime as the “father of biodiversity”) and Robert H. MacArthur reported in a 1967 book, The Theory of Island Biogeography, there is a direct relationship between the number of species found in a terrestrial habitat and its area (measured in hectares).³² Destroying half of a habitat, for example, reduces its species count by 13 percent. Likewise, the estimated extinction rate in Latin America’s forests has averaged 0.13 percent a year, given that tree cover has receded at an annual rate of 0.50 percent in recent decades.³³

In one of many applications of the theory of island biogeography, Norman Myers and four other ecologists identified “hotspots” around the world where terrestrial biodiversity is in jeopardy. Habitat destruction is severe in each hotspot, where large numbers of plant and vertebrate species are still found and which has exceptional floral and faunal endemism. Some of these areas are insular: Madagascar and the Philippines, for example. Others, such as the littoral forests of West Africa, are nearly so—hemmed in on one side by salt water and on the other side by lands that are inhospitable to hotspots’ endemic plants and animals.³⁴

Hotspots are plentiful in Latin America. Central Chile, which has a Mediterranean climate, made Myers et al.’s revised list, which was published in 2000. The tropical portion of the Andes Mountains, from the Altiplano of Bolivia up through Peru and Ecuador to northern Colombia, is also on the list. Remnants of rain forests that used to extend without interruption from western Ecuador through the Chocó of western Colombia and into the Darién region of eastern Panama comprise another hotspot. So do Meso America, from western Panama well up into Mexico, as well as the Caribbean, which includes southern Florida and all the Greater and Lesser Antilles. Brazil has a pair of hotspots. One is the Cerrado, which includes extensive wetlands. The other consists of what remains of the country’s Atlantic Coast forests. The Brazilian Amazon is not on Myers et al.’s list since so much of that area remains undisturbed.³⁵

Myers et al. offered no economic analysis. Nor have others with knowledge of biodiverse habitats under serious threat.³⁶ But economists who examine biodiversity have estimated a wide range of values. Detailed analysis of the economic contribution that specimens collected in the wild make to pharmaceutical research suggests that habitat destruction costs no more than $40 a hectare in any of the hotspots identified by Myers et al.³⁷ If other benefits are considered along with pharmaceutical innovation, however, the economic impact of destroying species-rich forests in Latin America is estimated to be considerably higher, perhaps as much as $717 a hectare.³⁸

Even this maximum estimate pales in comparison to the value of carbon sequestration. Every year, 5.9 billion tons of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere as 7 million hectares of tropical forests are cut over and converted to other land uses.³⁹ These emissions can be valued by applying an estimate of monetary damages per ton of CO₂ emissions, commonly referred to as the social cost of carbon. While some economists contend that this social cost is as high as $200,⁴⁰ William Nordhaus, whose economic analysis of climate change won him a Nobel Prize in 2018, finds that emitting a ton of CO₂ creates damages worth $53.⁴¹ Given this estimate as well as mean emissions of 419 tons a hectare,⁴² the social cost of deforestation in South America averages $22,207 a hectare, absent consideration of the carbon that would be captured in the future if trees remained in place and continued to grow. Also according to Nordhaus, the 2.2 billion net tons of CO₂ absorbed every year by tropical forests plus net annual sequestration of 4.4 billion tons by forests farther from the equator are worth $350 billion.⁴³

*   *   *

Determining the value of ecosystem services provided by tree-covered habitats is one thing. Implementing policies that oblige economic actors to factor that value into their decision making is something else. Various approaches have been employed, including the establishment of protected areas and timber concessions. In Brazil, regulation of activities such as land clearing and road construction along with commitments agribusinesses made not to purchase soybeans and other commodities harvested in recently deforested areas slowed habitat destruction after the turn of the twenty-first century.⁴⁴ In contrast, secure resource ownership has resulted in the capture of environmental values in Chile and Costa Rica. The Central American nation, in particular, has been able to make payments for environmental services (PES) the linchpin of its conservation strategy because private property rights are ubiquitous. While these payments could perhaps be distributed more effectively,⁴⁵ their contribution to forest recovery is undeniable.⁴⁶

Satisfying the institutional prerequisites of habitat conservation is always a challenge. Even in a country as small as Costa Rica, surveying and registering everyone’s property takes years as well as a sizable monetary outlay. Also, Brazilian experience after 2012, when forestry legislation was amended so as to facilitate private ownership of more tree-covered land, demonstrates that many individuals with new titles choose to clear at least some of their holdings.⁴⁶

But the fact remains that the environment suffers where institutional prerequisites remain unsatisfied—as demonstrated by the shortcomings of PES, on which $500 to $700 million a year have been spent around the world since the turn of the twenty-first century.⁴⁸ In 2007, a new PES initiative—Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+)—was launched at the United Nations Climate Conference in Bali. Funded generously from the start by Norway, REDD+ provided a way for affluent nations to pay for the protection of threatened habitats in developing countries.⁴⁹ However, the environmental benefits have been disappointing—largely because REDD+ monies flow through governments, which has limited the payments local people receive in return for the conservation measures they apply.⁵⁰

Whether or not the threat to tree-covered habitats is imminent, climate change has had important consequences in Latin America. As in other parts of the world, warmer temperatures are allowing forests to move up the sides of mountains.⁵⁶ Trees are also encroaching on the Brazilian Cerrado and other savannas where rainfall has increased.⁵⁷ More broadly, greater concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere have elevated the capacity of all forests for carbon absorption.⁵⁸ This benefit is especially pronounced in the low latitudes and explains why net carbon sequestration has increased in Latin America’s forests despite large-scale habitat destruction.⁵⁹ Accelerated productivity, however, can cause inadvertent problems, such as faster growth of lianas, which can do much harm to trees during logging operations.⁶⁰

The risks posed by climate change turn out to be acute in parks and other protected areas, which amount to 267 million hectares in Latin America.⁶¹ Simply outlawing agriculture, timber extraction, and other development on all those hectares is an inadequate response to ecological change expected to result from anticipated swings in temperatures and precipitation.⁶² To arrest the extinction of plant and animal species, adaptive management is needed. But management, adaptive or otherwise, is missing from most protected areas. Establishing new parks without investing in management has the potential to compound the harm done by climate change.

Of course, adaptation to climate change is unlikely where protected areas are not really protected. If forest fires become more frequent, as predicted by some models,⁶³ farmers and ranchers can be expected to encroach more on tree-covered habitats where state claims on natural resources outstrip governmental capabilities to police access. In contrast, individuals and communities that have property rights have at least some incentive to regenerate forests or perhaps try novel species better suited to new climatic conditions.⁶⁴ Thus, adaptation to climate change, which will have a sizable pay-off in the years to come, has institutional prerequisites.

This book’s examination of forest transition begins in the second chapter with a survey of the demand side of the food economy. Special attention is paid to demographic transition, which got underway in some parts of Latin America during the 1800s, and to the institutional realities that have shaped the economies of Brazil, Peru, and their neighbors. Also discussed is transformation of food-related industries in the region since the 1980s.

The supply side of the food economy is the subject of the third chapter. The Green Revolution and subsequent advances resulting from the application of biotechnology to grain production are a primary focus. These developments have boosted output while arresting the geographic expansion of agriculture in Latin America no less than in other parts of the world. As documented elsewhere in this book, similar developments have benefited the banana industry, livestock producers, and other subsectors.

Examined in the fourth chapter are forest loss, gross deforestation, and net deforestation, which peaked globally during the 1930s. Long-term outcomes in Latin America are related to demographic trends, economic growth, resource use and extraction, infrastructure expansion, and the evolution of property rights. While deforestation has slowed in Brazil and other countries since the turn of the twenty-first century, additional deceleration depends on the continued strengthening of forest ownership.

Forest recovery is the subject of the fifth chapter. In the United States, reforestation has resulted from slower population growth and improved agricultural technology combined with rising prices for wood. The same process began earlier in Europe and more recently in Chile, Costa Rica, and some parts of Brazil. Although tree planting has become an indispensable tool of forest renewal, natural regeneration is happening throughout tropical Latin America, ensuring that not all forest loss becomes net deforestation. Market forces are an underestimated contributor to forest renewal. Institutions are also an important factor.

Specific initiatives aimed at reducing the environmental harm of logging, making better use of nontimber products harvested in forests, and applying PES are examined in the sixth chapter. Local ownership has been essential for the success of each of these initiatives.

Ecosystem services provided by forests such as biodiversity protection and carbon sequestration are immensely valuable. Unfortunately, market actors do not give environmental values full weight, so there is too much deforestation and too little reforestation even if natural resources belong to individuals and communities. As explained in the seventh chapter, conservation payments, which are possible with property rights, are an effective remedy.

Climate change already has affected forests in Latin America and throughout the world. Evidence presented in the eighth chapter suggests that forests are not under imminent threat from climate change and that the clearing of forests remains a far more serious problem. Similar policy advice can be given both for climate change and for deforestation. That is, private landowners are more likely than state agencies to adapt successfully to changing environmental conditions. Efforts by international organizations such as the United Nations to protect forests are reviewed as well.

Finally, the future transition of Latin America’s forests is outlined in the ninth chapter, with particular attention paid to demographic, economic, agricultural, and institutional developments in the years to come. Along with trends on the horizon in the forestry sector, these developments all point to a continuing recovery of tree-covered habitats.

Notes

1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

2. United Nations.

3. Ibid.

4. Reuters (2021).

5. Colchester.

6. IPCC, chapter 7.

7. Costanza et al.

8. Victor and Ausubel.

9. Fogel.

10. Omran.

11. Meadows et al., 124.

12. Ibid., 48–54.

13. Ibid., 158–63.

14. Ehrlich, 135.

15. Ibid., 160.

16. Acemoglu and Robinson, 42–44.

17. Edwards, 117–21.

18. Acemoglu and Robinson, 7–9.

19. Popkin and Reardon.

20. Ruttan.

21. Landes, 41.

22. Ruttan.

23. Southgate, Graham, and Tweeten, 259–62.

24. Ibid., 64–65.

25. McAfee, 23–24.

26. Mendelsohn and Sohngen.

27. Mather.

28. Mendelsohn and Sohngen.

29. Bohn and Deacon.

30. Rights and Resources Initiative.

31. Fortmann et al.

32. MacArthur and Wilson, 8.

33. FAO (2020).

34. Myers et al.

35. Ibid.

36. Mittermeier et al.

37. Simpson, Sedjo, and Reid.

38. Siikamäki et al.

39. Friedlingstein et al.

40. Rennert et al.

41. Barrage and Nordhaus.

42. FAO (2020).

43. Harris et al.

44. Nepstad et al. (2014).

45. Robalino and Pfaff.

46. Murguia et al.

47. Freitas et al.

48. IPCC, chapter 7.

49. Salzman et al.

50. Luttrell et al.

51. Lovejoy and Nobre (2018).

52. Boulton et al.

53. Hubau et al.

54. Albert et al.

55. Parmesan et al.

56. Moret et al.

57. Criado et al.

58. Friedlingstein et al.

59. Harris et al.

60. Reis et al.

61. FAO (2020).

62. Hoffman et al.

63. Kim et al.

64. Tian et al. (2016); Tian et al. (2018); Favero et al. (2022).