affect the price of the farmers’ produce. Changes in the demand for labor are
likely to affect local wages and migration flows.
Farmer characteristics, agroforestry technology, and market and tenure con-
ditions are possible checks on agricultural expansion that we shall discuss in the
following sections. Various aspects of each of these are listed in Table 5.2.
Farmer Characteristics
Farmers allocate their scarce resources (land, labor, and capital) to meet their
objectives, such as ensuring family survival, maximizing income, or minimiz-
ing risk. Available technology, assets, market conditions, land tenure, and
other factors constrain the choices farmers have available. Technological
change may modify these constraints and provide incentives to encourage
farmers to allocate their resources in a different manner. To understand farm-
ers’ response to technological change, one must understand farmers’ con-
straints and incentives.
Farmers in developing countries are generally constrained, particularly in
regard to labor and cash supplies, and the markets in which they engage are
far from perfect. Consider a situation in which the farm household cannot sell
its labor in a nonfarm labor market, nor can it hire labor to work on the farm.
Assume that with the old technology the available family labor allows the
household to cultivate 3 ha of land. If they adopt an agroforestry technology
for all agricultural land and that technology is 50 percent more labor intensive
(labor days per hectare), they can now cultivate only 2 ha; the remaining 1 ha
reverts to secondary forest. Thus, introduction of labor-intensive technologies
in the presence of labor constraints can reduce deforestation rates.
Farmers range from poor, isolated, and subsistence-oriented peasants to
rich, commercially oriented landowners. Each type of farmer tends to special-
ize in different crops and production systems, making certain innovations rel-
evant only for particular groups of farmers. Farmers respond differently to new
technological innovations in terms of both technology adoption and forest
impact. Smallholders tend to be more cash constrained, and this might pre-
vent them from using certain technological innovations. For example, an agro-
forestry practice might require purchase of expensive tree crop seedlings, and
fruit tree agriculture might rely on expensive transportation of the harvest to
an urban market.
Capital-intensive technologies can have negative impacts on already poor
farmers in several ways: they may not be able to afford the new technologies,
they might suffer from lower wages and output prices, and deforestation may
reduce forest-based incomes and environmental services. The main asset of the
poor normally is their own labor. One might therefore argue that poor farm-
ers have a comparative advantage in labor-intensive technologies such as many
agroforestry practices. But rich farmers might be in a better position to
- Is Agroforestry Likely to Reduce Deforestation? 95