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Development policies, resource constraints, and agricultural expansion on the Philippine land frontier

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2002

Ian Coxhead ,
Gerald Shively  and
Xiaobing Shuai
Ian Coxhead
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Gerald Shively
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue UniversityUSA
Xiaobing Shuai
Affiliation:
Capital One Finance Corp, Richmond, VA, USA
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Abstract

This paper examines ways in which development policies interact and influence incentives for agricultural expansion in frontier areas. We develop a model of household response to economic and technical stimuli, conditional on agronomic and household characteristics. We evaluate the model empirically using survey data gathered from low-income corn and vegetable farms near a national park in the southern Philippines. We find that within farms, land allocation is responsive to relative crop prices and yields. However, different crops elicit different responses. In particular, some crop expansion takes place primarily through land substitution and intensified input use, while changes in prices or yields of other crops induce an expansion of total farm area. Land and family labor constraint bind at different points for different crops. These results suggest that because multiple policies interact, environmental policies must have multiple strands in order to replace incentives to further land expansion.

JEL codes: Q12, Q24, O13.

Keywords

land useagricultureenvironmentpolicyPhilippines
Type
Theory and Applications
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , May 2002 , pp. 341 - 363
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics Staff Paper Series No. 425. Research for this paper was supported by the SANREM CRSP (USAID Contract # CPE A–00–98–00019–00), and by the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin. An earlier version was presented at a conference on ‘Technological change in agriculture and deforestation’, CATIE, Turrialba, Costa Rica, 11–13 March 1999. We are grateful to conference participants and two EDE reviewers for comments on earlier drafts; remaining errors are ours alone.