Migration necessarily precedes environmental change in the form of deforestation and soil degradation in tropical agricultural frontiers. But what environmental factors may contribute to these migration streams in the first place? Identifying environmental characteristics related to this process is crucial for understanding how environmental change and migration may form recurrent feedback loops. Further understanding this process could be useful for developing policies to reduce both environmentally induced migration from origin areas and also to palliate significant environmental change unleashed by settler deforestation in destination areas. Evidently, apprehending this holistic process cannot be approached only from the destination since this ignores environmental and other antecedents to rural out-migration. This paper presents data from surveys conducted in areas of high out-migration to the agricultural frontier in northern Guatemala. 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.

中文翻译：

---

农村人口外流至危地马拉玛雅生物圈保护区的农业生态驱动因素


移民必然先于热带农业边境地区森林砍伐和土壤退化等环境变化发生。但哪些环境因素首先可能促成这些移民流呢？识别与这一过程相关的环境特征对于理解环境变化和迁移如何形成循环反馈循环至关重要。进一步了解这一过程可能有助于制定政策，以减少环境引起的原籍地移民，并缓解目的地地区定居者砍伐森林所造成的重大环境变化。显然，不能仅从目的地来理解这一整体过程，因为这忽略了农村人口外流的环境和其他因素。本文提供了在危地马拉北部农业边境大量移民的地区进行的调查数据。结果表明，原住民社区的土地稀缺和退化通常与人口外迁有关，特别是与危地马拉北部的森林边界有关。