Submissions Accepted for Presentation at the World Bank Land Conference 2024

Food security is vital for a decent life, particularly in early development and with lasting adult health effects. Forests have historically played a key role by offering essential ecosystem services and a direct source of diverse, nutrient-rich foods and medicines. This study explores the link between forests and food security in Colombian and Peruvian Amazon communities. Panel data from households in each country was collected to calculate a multidimensional household-level food security index. Our findings reveal that households with forest access have higher food security, however the effect of this depended on the quality of the forest. Indigenous communities in Colombia also relied more on the forest than non-Indigenous communities in Peru. These findings suggest that the impact of forests on food security depends on the quality of the forest, the cultural practices of those accessing the forest, and the proximity and ease of accessing the forest.

We explore the relationship between armed conflict and agricultural land use based on household data from West Africa. In contrast to previous studies, we also investigate cross-border effects of conflict. The cross-border regions are the regions where the conflict intensity is among the largest in Western Africa. Single country analysis of conflict on agricultural land fail to capture the entire effects in these regions. We employ a cross-sectional spatial approach incorporating data from Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. We find an ambiguous relationship between conflict and land use. Additionally, we find substantial heterogeneity of the relation between conflict and land use across distances. We therefore argue that the impact of conflict on land use is too heterogeneous to aggregate to a clear linear relationship.

We analyze the labor market effects of oil palm cultivation among smallholder farmers in Indonesia. Oil palm requires less labor per unit of land than alternative crops, especially less female labor. Micro-level data and nationally-representative regency-level data show that oil palm adoption, on average, led to an expansion of total cropland at the expense of forestland, resulting in higher agricultural labor demand for men. At the same time, women’s employment rates declined due to a substantial decrease in agricultural family labor, which was most evident in regions with high initial land scarcity and thus limited options for cropland expansion.

Despite the numerous initiatives for sustainable agricultural supply chains in high-income countries (HIC), there is little evidence on whether these initiatives effectively reduce environmental degradation in tropical cultivation areas. In our study, we compare patterns in oil palm planting and deforestation on peatlands in Indonesia between HIC investments, that are more frequently involved in sustainability initiatives, with domestic investments or those by neighboring low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Our dataset comprises 386 concessions in Kalimantan and Papua, their investment structure, annual maps on forest loss and oil palm cultivation, and spatial maps on peatlands. Our results show a divergence in production practices after 2011, with actors tied to HIC reducing their environmental degradation while actors from LMIC kept their practices unchanged. While this is good news in terms of the effectiveness of ‘western’ initiatives, companies from HIC have only a limited market share compared to companies from LMIC.