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

Farms 25/77 NQ and 27/77N0, located in North East District, were acquired by the Government

from the freeholder, Mr Blackbeard in 1990. The purchase followed the recommendations of the

consultants appointed to conduct the feasibility study of the Lower Shashe dam (SMEC, 1990), and

had the objective of providing compensatory land for Matopi villagers who need to be relocated

before flooding of the reservoir.

During the latter part of 1990, the Tati Land Board proposed compensating Matopi residents by

The prosperity of Botswana largely depends on its natural resources. As to the agricultural sector, poor utilization of land resources has until now resulted in low crop yields, poor livestock offtake rates, low rural household incomes and widespread degradation of soils and rangeland. Acknowledging these problems, the Botswana Government has recently adopted a series of policies to ensure that land resources are used in a sustainable manner.

This technical report is one of a series of reports prepared during the of the course of the FAO/UNOP project (ETH/02/012) preparing the Assistance to Settlement Project Phase IV.

The 1: 2 000 000 Soil Associations map is based on

the Geomorphology and Soils map, at 1: 1 000 000 scals, prepared

by the FAO/UNDP Eth/78/003, Assistance to Land Use PlJ

Project in 1981 It incorporates some new information ob%,3 _

since the finalizing of the Geomorphology and soils map.