This special issue focuses on the poor and their role in forest degradation. The idea that the poor are both agents of forest degradation and victims of forest loss is not new. Neither is the observation that unsustainable rates of forest use by smallholder farmers arises as a result of a complex interplay of incentives, constraints, and institutional forces. For researchers and policy makers concerned with natural resource use in low-income settings, theory is often useful, but rarely adequate to explain behavioural patterns. Unambiguous theoretical findings tend to flow only from substantial sets of simplifying assumptions, and such assumptions, measured against the observed facts of smallholder agriculture, seem largely untenable. Unfortunately much empirical research on the topic suffers from an opposite problem. In settings where, at any point in time, everything matters and nothing is held constant, econometric findings are frequently weak. The combination of heterogeneity of circumstance, homogeneity of market signals, and limitations on smallholder response generally overwhelms the statistical power of small data sets, often collected with different purposes in mind.

This paper examines the role forests play in alleviating poverty in rural Malawi. Data from three villages in southern Malawi indicate high levels of forest dependence. Gini decomposition shows that access to forest income reduced measured income inequality at the study sites. Tobit analysis of the determinants of reliance on low-return and high-return forest activities indicates that asset-poor households are more reliant on forest activities compared with the better off; reliance on high-return activities is conditioned also by availability of adult male labor and location. Taken together, the study's findings suggest that forests prevent poverty by supplementing income, and may also help to improve the living standards of households that are able to enter into high-return forest occupations. Policy implications are discussed.

We demonstrate a new approach to understanding the role of fuelwood in the rural household economy by applying insights from travel cost modeling to author-compiled household survey data and meso-scale environmental statistics from Ruteng Park in Flores, Indonesia. We characterize Manggarai farming households' fuelwood collection trips as inputs into household production of the utility yielding service of cooking and heating. The number of trips taken by households depends on the shadow price of fuelwood collection or the travel cost, which is endogenous. Econometric analyses using truncated negative binomial regression models and correcting for endogeneity show that the Manggarai are ‘economically rational’ about fuelwood collection and access to the forests for fuelwood makes substantial contributions to household welfare. Increasing cost of forest access, wealth, use of alternative fuels, ownership of kerosene stoves, trees on farm, park staff activity, primary schools and roads, and overall development could all reduce dependence on collecting fuelwood from forests.

Global tropical deforestation continues to be a critical environmental issue and nowhere in the world is the issue more pronounced than in Brazil. This paper examines the land-use choices of small-scale farmers in Ouro Preto do Oeste, Rondônia, Brazil and investigates how agricultural production impacts deforestation levels. The data used to explore these issues consist of a panel collected from 152 households in 1996 and 2000. Overall, the empirical models indicate that access to credit, wealth, lot size, product markets, and off-farm labor opportunities, largely influence deforestation and production decisions. Among other things, the results suggest that more sustainable production methods are unlikely to be adopted by a majority of households under current conditions because the production of milk has rapidly advanced due to its moderate labor requirements and existing market infrastructure. Households with greater levels of wealth have focused on milk while those with access to credit have focused on crops. Since the production of crops is largely influenced by access to credit, similar incentives may be proposed to support more sustainable production activities to help reduce deforestation.

This paper examines coping strategies in response to covariate flood shocks and idiosyncratic health shocks among riverine peasant households in the Amazonian tropical forests. An assessment of coping strategies reveals that although precautionary savings (food stock and livestock) are important for both types of shocks, ex post labor supply responses in the form of upland cropping and resource extraction (fishing and non-timber forest product gathering) are more common to cope with the flood shock depending on local environments. A bivariate probit model examines what factors shape households' adoption decisions of gathering and fishing as a coping strategy. The analysis reveals an important insurance role of non-timber forest product gathering for the asset poor who have limited options for coping with flood risk. Targeted interventions and programs for the poor to promote sustainable forest resource use are discussed.

This paper addresses factors influencing agricultural land use in rural households in El Salvador, with particular attention paid to the effects of income. Two linkages between the area a household farms and income per capita are critical. First, there is a precautionary demand for land that can be used for subsistence agriculture and this demand declines as income rises. Second, the area a household is able to farm goes up as income increases. Together, these two linkages imply that the relationship between agricultural land use and per capita income takes the shape of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC).

Using panel data collected since 1995 in four biennial surveys of a nationally representative sample of rural households, we have analyzed agricultural land use at the household level. Evidence of an EKC relating farmed area to per capita income has been obtained. In addition, other factors influencing a household's use of natural resources have been examined.

This paper examines agricultural intensification and its impact on deforestation in a frontier region of the Philippines. Panel data covering the period 1994–2000 are used to study labor demand and resource reallocation in response to lowland irrigation development. Results illustrate how irrigation has led to changes in employment, incomes, and activities at the forest margin. Findings indicate that the off-farm employment opportunities created by irrigation development have helped to reduce rates of forest clearing. Although some initial employment gains have been reversed, wage-induced increases in agricultural productivity in the uplands have reduced forest pressure. Results show that lowland irrigation has had direct, indirect, and lagged effects on rates of forest clearing, and that a virtuous cycle may be at play, with irrigation leading to both poverty reduction and reduced forest pressure.