Largeholder deforestation and land conflict in the eastern Brazilian Amazon

Over the past thirty years research on land cover and land use change in Amazonia has indicated a number of human-environment interactions which have led to extensive deforestation in the world's largest and most diverse standing tropical forest. Various underlying socioeconomic causes of deforestation are well explicated in the existing primary literature, and include economic development, concerns of national security, and market influence. However, to date very little attention has been paid to the potential for social interactions between land managers to drive deforestation in the region. This dissertation focuses on one particularly contentious type of interaction---land conflict---in one of Brazil's most active and controversial deforestation fronts in the South of the state of Para. Land conflict in this part of Brazil typically pits largeholder ranchers against the landless poor, with conflicts frequently escalating to the occupation of private property and even violent intimidation and murder. A number of factors contribute to this violence, but among the most important is constitutional law, which allows for the expropriation of private property for agrarian reform purposes if land is not considered "productive." In the Amazon, the most common measure of productivity is the amount of cleared land, leading to a significant incentive for deforestation. When this constitutional law is combined with a socially organized peasantry, largeholders are likely to take extreme measures to protect their property, including significant deforestation. This work draws from concepts in the land change science literature, a rich concept of geographic "place," and contentious politics in order to describe how conflict could be an underlying driver of deforestation. Drawing from this integration of political and ecological considerations, I develop a logistic regression model which shows that the social movement organizations which confront wealthy cattle ranchers do so with much greater likelihood on properties displaying various physical and legal characteristics. Drawing from the insights provided by this logistic regression model, I then specify a spatial error regression model which indicates, among other things, that land conflict increases the amount of deforestation on largeholdings in the region. The data used to develop these models involves an extensive archive of newspaper accounts, key informant interviews with a variety of actors on both sides of the ongoing struggle for land, geographic information systems, and remote sensing. Among the chief policy implications of this research is a potential need to rethink the current measure of the productivity of properties in the Amazon to include criteria such as labor conditions, number of people employed, ecologically responsible use, and actual productivity. A redefinition of productivity in this way could both limit environmental wrongs and begin to repair the rift between largeholders and the landless laborers of the region.