Déterminants sociaux et économiques de la replantation

Abstract

The farmer's objective is to maintain or increase income and food security despite a land shortage. Replanting should enable farmers to face land shortages, forest shortages (the dissolution of forest rent - lower fertility, more weeds, more pests, etc.), aging orchards and the accompanying yield reduction and increased maintenance and harvest costs, risk food shortages and an opportunity to use new planting materials. Labor and capital constraints may hamper replanting because farmers who replant neither benefit from forest rent nor from cheap access to land. Replanting may also confront a labor shortage because migration has slowed or children have been sent to school. In the intersection between fami'y life cycles and tree life cycles, older farmers may lack the labor to replant, while young men may not always have access to land. Cut trees may have a cash value, which is a means to convert tree capital and labor to cash. Price factors directly trigger a replanting decision by comparing prices of a tree crop to those of an annual crop that can be intercropped, or by anticipating higher prices for the tree crop in the years to come. Price factors may indirectly trigger a replanting decision by lowering maintenance and inputs devoted to the established trees. A decline in yield and income could increase tree mortality, which would make the replanting decision easier.