Agro-ecological drivers of rural out-migration to the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala

Abstract

Migration necessarily precedes environmental change in the form of deforestation and soil degradation in tropical settlement frontiers. But what environmental factors may contribute to these migration streams in the first place? Identification of the environmental characteristics related to this process is crucial for understanding how environmental change and migration may form recurrent feedback loops. Further understanding of this process could be useful for developing policies to both reduce environmentally induced migration from origin areas and also palliate significant environmental change unleashed by settler deforestation in destination areas. Evidently, apprehension of this holistic process cannot be approached only from the destination since this ignores environmental and other antecedents to rural out-migration. This letter presents data from surveys conducted in areas of high out-migration to the agricultural frontier in northern Guatemala. The results suggest that land scarcity and degradation in origin communities are linked to out-migration in general and to the forest frontier of northern Guatemala in particular. © 2012 IOP Publishing Ltd.