| In this research I consider several of the less understood aspects of agricultural land use change, an issue at the heart of a broader discussion on the tradeoffs between economic development and environmental conservation. I focus specifically on a region of rapid agricultural change, namely the Brazilian Amazon, where agricultural and beef production have tripled in recent decades, and more than 200,000 square kilometers of forest areas have been destroyed.;Specifically, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of the impacts of land use change by focusing on the so-called indirect effects associated with expanding agricultural production, or how production changes in one location may lead to changes in behaviors and land uses in another, potentially distant location. To date, much of the work on indirect land use change has conceptualized the process as a series of indirect effects originating from market dynamics and policies. Here I present another conceptual element to this process, namely an investment effect where skills and capital are liquidated and spatially (re)distributed over a landscape, perpetually in flux and in chase of rents and investment opportunities. The Brazilian Amazon, a region that has undergone rapid changes in forest cover, pasture, and cropland, serves as an example par excellence of indirect land use change, given the pace of land cover change within the area.;Conceptually, I draw from migration theories to understand the movement of capital resources. I situate Sjaastad's neoclassical theory of labor mobility within the context of the rent or location based economic landscape associated with von Thünen to suggest that the market dynamics that continually reshape an economic landscape also paint a dynamic canvas of opportunity costs and migration incentives. These incentives act to both distribute and redistribute not only land uses, but also the skills and capital essential to rural production.;At its core, this dissertation seeks to clarify how the globalization of the Amazon and the soybean expansion of the past decade have acted both directly and indirectly to push back forest cover and pull in capital. I approach the problem through a mixed method, multi scale approach that combines field work with an innovative spatial econometric model. The results suggest a positive and significant linkage between the expansion of soybean production across Brazil and deforestation in the Amazon. The field level dynamics that underlie this linkage are, evidently, driven by the relocation of skills and capital, with farmers and ranchers from consolidated agricultural and pastoral regions seeking to maximize their utility by acquiring larger parcels in the Amazon. The dissertation provides evidence to suggest that land use change occurs upon the transfer of land between owners of different skill sets, and that former landowners relocate their production strategies to new locations upon displacement from their former properties.;The research is expected to contribute to the broader discussion of land use and land policy, and on the relationships between land use and global markets. It has clearly connected land use to migration patterns, and has done so by situating migration within the context of a globalizing economy, and one which is rapidly incorporating the Amazon into its midst. |
