Colonization, clear-cutting, and cornfields: Rural migration and deforestation in The Sierra de Lacandón National Park, Petén, Guatemala

This paper uses household level data to examine the ecological and political factors and household characteristics associated with small farmer land use change and forest clearing between 1993 and 1998. The research site is a settlement frontier within a protected area in northern Guatemala. The great expanse of accessible, open land of the Sierra de Lacandón National Park (SLNP) has been a magnet for land-poor colonists from other rural areas in Guatemala. Colonists arrived following the construction of a road through the area in the early 1980s. Today farmers occupy lands up to 20 kilometers into the SLNP, a core zone of Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve. There is an immediate concern for the continued expansion of the agricultural frontier further into the park. This paper considers the household and farm characteristics and the land use and land allocation decisions of 132 farmers in the SLNP to understand how these factors may contribute to forest clearing in the park. For the purpose of this research, farms are separated into two categories. The first group includes the 33% of farmers in the sample who cleared the most forest between 1993 and 1998 between and who farmed land in the SLNP in both years. The second group includes the 33% of farmers who cleared the least amount of forest during the same time period. The analysis finds significant variability in the amount of forest cleared in the sample. While the high deforestation group cleared an average of 13.6 hectares, or 49% of their forest during the time period, the low deforestation group on average experienced modest forest regrowth on their farms. This challenges the notion that frontier farming in the tropics is consistently and uniformly expansive. The key factor involved in forest clearing was farm size. The farms of greatest forest loss between the two time periods were more than twice as large as the farms in the lowest deforestation.