Articles

High-yield oil palm expansion spares land at the expense of forests in the Peruvian Amazon

Gutiérrez-Vélez, Victor Hugo; Padoch, Christine; DeFries, Ruth S.; Uriarte, Maria; Pinedo-Vasquez, Miguel Angel; Baethgen, Walter E.; de Avila Fernandes, Katia; Lim, Yili

High-yield agriculture potentially reduces pressure on forests by requiring less land to increase production. Using satellite and field data, we assessed the area deforested by industrial-scale high-yield oil palm expansion in the Peruvian Amazon from 2000 to 2010, finding that 72% of new plantations expanded into forested areas. In a focus area in the Ucayali region, we assessed deforestation for high- and smallholder low-yield oil palm plantations. Low-yield plantations accounted for most expansion overall (80%), but only 30% of their expansion involved forest conversion, contrasting with 75% for high-yield expansion. High-yield expansion minimized the total area required to achieve production but counter-intuitively at higher expense to forests than low-yield plantations. The results show that high-yield agriculture is an important but insufficient strategy to reduce pressure on forests. We suggest that high-yield agriculture can be effective in sparing forests only if coupled with incentives for agricultural expansion into already cleared lands.

Geographic Areas

Files

  • thumnail for high-yield_oil_palm_expansion_spares_land_at_the_expense_of_forests_in_the_peruvian_amazon.pdf high-yield_oil_palm_expansion_spares_land_at_the_expense_of_forests_in_the_peruvian_amazon.pdf application/pdf 679 KB Download File

Also Published In

Title
Environmental Research Letters
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044029

More About This Work