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.
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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044029Altmetric score:
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Publication year
2012
Authors
Gutierrez-Velez, V.H.; DeFries, R.; Pinedo-Vasquez, M.; Uriarte, M.; Padoch, C.; Baethgen, W.; Fernandes, K.; Lim, Y.
Language
English
Keywords
agriculture, farming systems, intensification, intensive cropping, remote sensing, yield increases, land use change, tropical forests, deforestation, conservation, biofuels
