Douglas Southgate is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at The Ohio State University.
They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership Are Saving Forests in Latin America, and reported the following:
Page 99 of our book, Reversing Deforestation, opens a new section of chapter 5 titled “Sustainable Forestry.” The text on the page illustrates how forests can be managed sustainably over the long-term using either “Maximum Sustainable Yield” (MSY) or “Faustmann” rules for the age to harvest trees. We begin by describing how these approaches were worked out in the 1700s by foresters who were worried about dwindling tree supplies as population and income started to rise in Europe. Both approaches are still used today. The MSY cutting cycle, as its name implies, maximizes the supply of timber from a site. It has been widely adopted by government agencies around the world, as well as some private landowners. Other private landowners, including those whose woodlands provide an increasingly large share of the world’s wood output, harvest at the Faustmann age. This regime optimizes land value, resulting in a shorter cutting cycle, a smaller annual supply of timber, and younger forests. Both approaches provide a sustainable supply of timber over the long run, although the forests under the two regimes will look different.Learn more about Reversing Deforestation at the Stanford University Press website.
The text on page 99 absolutely captures a key theme of our book – that forests are in the habit of coming back after being cut or after land is used for food production – but it misses the broader context we offer about why and how sustainable forests will emerge from the last century and a half of deforestation in Latin America. Specifically, this book explores how trends in demography, markets, technology, institutions and ownership have influenced land use historically in Latin America. We then explain how changes in their future trajectories mean deforestation will diminish and reforestation will expand.
Chapter 5, where page 99 is found, provides important context about why slowing population growth combined with increasing crop yields mean that a reversal of deforestation is imminent in Latin America. The chapter begins with a description of the US, where forests have returned because real prices for corn and soybeans fell as yields increased and real prices for wood rose as old growth stocks were cut. Nearly all the returning forests there are on privately held land.
Forests have returned elsewhere, including two countries with a preponderance of private forests: Chile and Costa Rica. But even in Brazil, private forests have returned to provide energy for sustainable iron production. Local ownership also includes community forestry, which is thriving in Latin America. From ejidos established long ago in Mexico, to more recently established community forestry operations in the Maya Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala, Brazil, and elsewhere, local ownership resists deforestation.
Today, demography is heading in the right direction and deforestation is slowing across Latin America. Birth rates are down, and the total fertility rate of 1.9 births per female is well below the replacement threshold of 2.1. Population in the region will increase some, but will end this century about where it started, at 670 million souls. Food production is also heading in the right direction. Yields for corn and soybeans have continued to increase, and prices have continued to decline in real terms. These falling prices are a major disincentive for land conversion in the hinterlands. If institutions and property rights can be adapted to support local owners – be they communities or individuals – in places where deforestation remains problematic, markets will do the rest to reverse deforestation.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
