Resource information
Rural roads promote economic development, but they also facilitate deforestation.
To explore this tradeoff, this article develops a spatially explicit model of land use
and estimates probabilities of alternative land uses as a function of land characteristics
and distance to market using a multinomial logit specification of this model.
Controls are incorporated for the endogeneity of road placement.
The model is applied to data for southern Belize, an area experiencing rapid
expansion of both subsistence and commercial agriculture, using geographic information
system (GIS) techniques to select sample points at 1-kilometer intervals. Market
access, land quality, and tenure status affect the probability of agricultural land
use synergistically, having differential effects on the likelihood of commercial versus
semisubsistence farming. The results suggest that road building in areas with agriculturally
poor soils and low population densities may be a “lose-lose” proposition,
causing habitat fragmentation and providing low economic returns.
