This paper analyzes the underlying determinants of rural land conflicts in Brazil involving squatters, landowners, the federal government, the courts and INCRA, the land reform agency. A model is presented whereby squatters and landowners strategically choose to engage in violence. Landowners use violence as a means of increasing the likelihood of successful eviction of squatters, and squatters use violence to increase the probability that the farm will be expropriated in their favor as part of the government's land reform program. The model's predictions are tested using state level data for Brazil for 22 states from 1988 through 1995. It is shown that the government's land reform policy, which is based on expropriation and settlement projects, paradoxically may be encouraging both sides to engage in more violence, rather than reducing conflicts.

This paper explores the interrelationship between poverty, risk, and deforestation by small farmers in the low-income tropics. A nonseparable household model reveals how exogenous shocks to the mean or variance of a food price distribution might affect peasants' incentives to clear forest. The resulting links between food price policy, farmer behavior, and deforestation offer an innovative explanation of the vicious cycle of peasant immiserization and tropical deforestation. An intriguing, testable hypothesis also emerges: that market-oriented reforms that increase the mean and variance of food prices may inadvertently stimulate deforestation in economies in which a sizable proportion of farmers are net buyers.

This article summarizes a comprehensive series of country studies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), addressing experiences with market based instruments (MBIs) and command and control (CAC) approaches. First, MBIs can be an important means for introducing some added efficiency to existing CAC mechanisms. The scope of the MBIs must, however, match the institutional capacity to implement them. MBI approaches that introduce gradual and flexible reforms are therefore more likely to be consistent with ongoing institutional changes. Second, while the revenue collection task of MBIs is often highlighted, there is a strong need to channel revenues to local authorities to assist in building institutional capacity. Finally, international donor agencies are most prone to recommend OECD solutions with little regard to institutional issues. Moreover, most of the information flow regarding MBIs has been of a 'north-south' variety, whereas increased information sharing in a 'south-south' dialog would benefit all parties.

In many developing regions of the world conventional agriculture is failing to meet the needs of people and at the same time is becoming progressively less ecologically sustainable. It is proposed that in a number of these regions, both overall economic development and the welfare of the inhabitants would improve if the primary form of land use was based on multiple use of those regions' natural biological resources, rather than continuing the practice of replacing or displacing them with marginal forms of agriculture. Testing this proposition, and then (if appropriate) effecting it, requires answers to a number of ecological, economic and management questions, in particular to do with: identifying those regions where biodiversity use has high potential the appropriate spatial scales for planning and management compatible combinations of different types of resource use ecological and economic trade-offs between different resource use enterprises how to arrive at the most efficient form of resource use sustainable levels of biodiversity harvest resource use decisions in relation to ecological drivers (such as climate and fire) institutional and regulatory structures that dictate current resource use. These questions, it is proposed, should form the basis of an international 'virtual' institute, composed of three Biodiversity Centres, one each in Latin America, southern Africa and Southeast Asia. Examples of multiple use, such as of wildlife in southern Africa, are used to illustrate the potential, and the management scale and other issues involved. If the development of this form of land use is to succeed, it will require technical and management advice and, in many cases, removal of 'perverse incentives' that prevent a change to the more economically and ecologically sustainable form of land use. From the beginning, the emphasis in the proposed centres would be on collaborative work involving governments, landowners and resource-based industries.