Roads, land use, and deforestation: A spatial model applied to Belize

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.