Land use strategies of household based enterprises, the timber industry, and deforestation in northwest Ecuador: The articulation of market forces, national policies, and local conditions

This study examines how local natural resource-use strategies, and deforestation in particular, are influenced by state policy, markets, and local conditions. In areas where local conditions are characterized by sizable local populations with clear claims on natural resources, these should be expected to take on the role of extractors. These conditions are likely to become more common in the future, as natural forests recede and populations living in, or close to, them gain formal exclusionary rights to their use.; This is illustrated by examining deforestation of Pacific Tropical Rain Forests in Northwest Ecuador and its associated socio-economic processes. By 1993, more than 25% of Northwest Ecuador's forests had been cleared, and selective logging might have occurred in up to 47% of the remaining forests.; Commercial logging by local native populations and migrants play a major role in deforestation. Resource-use strategies in Northwest Ecuador were shaped by the articulation of local conditions with state policy, external markets and Ecuador's population dynamics. Local household-based enterprises carry out the bulk (77%) of timber extraction in the region. The remainder is extracted by external primary producers. External factors of deforestation operate primarily as passive elements, limiting their actions to stimulating resource extraction by primary producers. Furthermore, large-scale timber firms (e.g., veneer) can not be said to be the only important passive factor of deforestation. There is a large number of small-to-medium enterprises buying tropical timber from local primary producers. Nevertheless, large-scale timber firms, primarily plywood/veneer, facilitate and often directly support small-scale commercial logging, including extraction of non-veneer woods, by local households. There are, at least, two layers of timber operators (e.g., middlemen, manufacturers) between primary producers and final timber markets. As a result, they operate in a highly simplified economy, often artificially accentuated, with limited price feedback from more profitable markets, which leads to very low local prices.; Commercial logging of different types of timber results in a spatial differentiation of deforestation. Deforestation advances in simultaneous frontiers, each one with a higher level of clearing intensity and associated to particular primary producers and timber commodities.; A critical finding is that domestic (i.e., Ecuador's) demand for wood drives commercial logging and, hence, deforestation in the region. Even without increases in the international demand for tropical woods, domestic demand is likely to be enough to sustain forest clearing in Northwest Ecuador in the future.