Agricultural land-use trajectories in a cocaine source region: Chapare, Bolivia

Abstract

In the Amazon basin, forest clearance models describe the processes of land-cover conversion from forest to agriculture and offer an insight into trajectories of land use in new agricultural areas as farmers respond to changes in household demographics, biophysical parameters and economic conditions. At the foothills of the Andes in the Chapare of Bolivia, there are several colonization areas where coca leaf, the base ingredient for cocaine, is grown. The coca economy is illegal in these areas and has not been integrated into colonist clearance models. We have examined the impacts of this illicit economy in three communities in Chapare where colonists were interviewed about their farming activities since settlement began in 1963. Changes in cropping patterns have been linked to landcover maps derived from satellite images. In one community, land-cover patterns became more complex as the illicit coca economy introduced a new set of drivers, different from those in the Amazon clearance models. The drivers, which were present at household, landscape and national levels, have acted in tandem at same periods in the past four decades whilst during other a single driver has dominated. Colonization, which began in the 1960s, became dominated by a lucrative illegal coca economy from the mid-1970s onwards, which was then gradually counteracted by anti-coca policies from the mid-1980s. The resulting land-cover trajectories were different than those described by colonist models, and land cover-change outcomes were different. Understanding these new drivers in an illicit economy is helpful towards directing policy on conservation and sustainable farming in the foothills of the highly diverse eastern Andean slopes. © 2008 Springer-Verlag US.