Deforestation, Agriculture Expansion, and Agricultural Productivity in Latin America

Dr. M.G. Ceddia, will be presenting some of his most recent work at the next conference of the International Society of Ecological Economics in Rio de Janeiro from June 16-19th 2012.

The work, which is the result of a collaboration with Dr. Sabine Sedlaceck (MODUL University), Dr. Nicholas Bardsley (University of Reading, UK), and Dr. Sergio Gomez (EC Joint Research Centre, IPTS, Seville, Spain), looks at whether agricultural intensification and corruption control helped to reduce agricultural expansion and relieve some of the pressure on tropical forests in Latin America.

The preliminary results indicate that when corruption control is high, agricultural intensification behaves unexpectedly by encouraging further agricultural expansion and leads to the emergence of a “Jevons paradox”. The paradox, first pointed out by the 19th century economist W.S. Jevons, implies that as the efficiency in the use of a resource (coal in Jevons time and land in the work in question) increases, more of the resource will be used rather than less.

Contact

Prof. Graziano Ceddia, MODUL University Vienna

Department of Public Governance and Management,

Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Vienna, Austria

graziano.ceddia@modul.ac.at | www.modul.ac.at