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The intensification of beef production has become a conservation target based on the idea of land sparing and the assumption that in order to contain deforestation and meet increasing beef demand we must increase productivity. There is also increasing attention and conservation credit being given to supply chain management in beef production. Based on a historical comparison between the US, a fully intensive system, and Brazil, one moving in that direction, we suggest that cattle ranching will intensify as a result of conservation investments (reductions in capital and land subsidies) rather than intensifying in order to produce conservation results. If the comparison holds, the new intensive system, however, will continue to require large natural resource inputs, government subsidies, and be plagued by social and conservation problems. It will also be held in thrall by a few large processing companies, which exert undue influence over both producers and consumers. Therefore, we suggest that closer attention be paid to attribution in the claim of conservation outcomes from intensive beef production.

In 2006 Brazil passed legislation allowing concessions for industrial timber harvest in public forests. This decision was part of a broader effort to control deforestation, which had spiked to its second highest level, of about 25,000 km2, in 2004. Specifically, concessions were implemented as a means to control a rampaging timber industry while providing a source of accessible timber for sustainable harvest. Timber concessions, however, are not without their critics worldwide. Here we review the process undertaken to address international concerns over concessions in the policy design, we discuss the process of implementation in Brazil from 2007 to 2014 and then attempt to provide insight into the challenges that lie ahead. Our findings suggest that even though Brazil's policy designers had the full knowledge of the difficulties with timber concessions, and attempted to design a concession framework to address those concerns, deeper structural problems within the industry and within government itself have prevented the successful scaling up of the concession model. Key hurdles include: government overlap and duplication causing unbearable transaction costs and risks to investors; an industry ill prepared and unwilling to adapt to the stringent requirements set in the policy; and little success in curtailing illegal logging beyond concession borders. While concessions remain a potentially important tool for the management of public forests, additional resources and time will need to be invested to overcome these barriers.

AbstractSmall landholders' contribution to Amazon deforestation in Brazil has been persistent even after government actions have allowed a steep reduction in the overall annual deforestation area since 2004. We investigate land clearing and the incentives to comply versus not to comply with environmental legislation, allowing for selection into compliance or noncompliance due to unobserved perceptions of Forest Code enforcement. Our dynamic land clearing model is empirically tested through an endogenous switching regression method applied to data collected from households in the Transamazon-BR163 region between 2003 and 2014, when Forest Code enforcement supposedly increased. We show that smallholder compliance and noncompliance preferences lead to a selection problem that must be addressed in any land clearing behavior examination. We find that greater marginalization, longer land tenure and transitions to cattle grazing, but not agricultural rents, are major contributors to forest clearance and incentives not to comply with the Forest Code.