Economic aspects of the demand for commercial Forest land in the state of Acre, Brazil

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Abstract

The question is the potential for sustainable forest practice for the state of Acre in Brazil's western Amazon. This paper uses a von Thunen-like approach together with local market data to examine commercial logging and mill opportunity for distances around Acre's mill and municipality center. It concludes that under recent and current conditions the harvesting of the mature forest at the frontier can continue sustainably while the majority of the natural forest surrounding Acre will remain beyond the reach of commercial forest harvest. Moreover, as harvests at the frontier may eventually extend to their financially limiting distance, sustainably managed operations closer to the mill will begin replacing the harvest operations of mature natural timber at the logging frontier. These latter can successfully support the local mills on a smaller area over a 30-year forest management cycle.

Introduction

Sustainable management is the over-riding global forest policy focus of the day (e.g., ITTO, 1990; Sachs, 2012; UN, 2021). Yet observations of almost any forest frontier provide abundant evidence of the greater likelihood either for forest conversion to agricultural land uses or for timber harvesting without replacement, harvesting that often leaves a residual area of degraded open access land that is left unmanaged for either agricultural or renewed forest activity. Mather's (1992) well-known forest transition hypothesis explains this sequence, tracing a general pattern of, first deforestation before, eventually forest recovery over a long course of time.1 Regions like the Amazon with extensive forest are perceived as prime examples of the early, deforestation and land degradation, segment of Mather's transition and much of the global policy discussion focuses on the means of creating more sustainable forest operations in such areas. In Brazil, both the law and administrative policy require sustainable management [Law no. 12,651 (May 25, 2012), better known as the New Forest Code2]. Yet the question remains, for Brazil and elsewhere, whether even well-designed legal proscription and reasonable enforcement can successfully induce sustainable management (SFM), particularly at the forest frontier.

This paper addresses the question of SFM in Brazil's state of Acre. Acre is deep within the Amazon in far southwestern Brazil, a distance of more than 1300 km from Manaus and even farther from the major markets in eastern Brazil (e.g., 2700 km to Sao Paulo). Acre is the forest frontier and lumber production is an important regional activity for Acre. Can logging be sustainable in Acre? This paper addresses that question with evidence from the recent performance of the region's forest industry. It traces local prices, costs and administrative requirements through a von Thunen (1826) pattern, first, of expanding forest extraction and, then, subsequent sustainable management to a potential distance of 500 km from Acre's two central municipalities. The findings are unusual in their observation that forestry can be a sustainable activity at less than 40% of the distance to Acre's 500 km frontier and, in fact, local forest industry performance confirms this conclusion.

The body of the paper begins with an introduction to the general forest transition hypothesis and the evidence underlying it, before continuing with background on Brazil's own recent historical experience. A third section of the paper introduces the generally accepted procedure for examining, first, the progress of timber harvesting to an expanding frontier and then, later, the potential for sustainable regrowth and forest management, before presenting a formal analytical model and the Acre data for assessing this model. Final sections of the paper describe the analytical results and discuss their policy and management implications for Acre and, potentially, for the more complete region of Brazil's Amazon as well as for forested frontiers elsewhere in South America. The Acre evidence suggests that sustainable forest management may be a more feasible expectation than often anticipated and, as it does, also encourages inquiry of those characteristics that explain differences in sustainability between Acre, other forests in Latin America and those in still other parts of the world.

Section snippets

Background

This section summarizes the forest transition hypothesis and its related implications for SFM, then continues with more specific evidence, first for Brazil and then for the state of Acre.

The analytical approach

Von Thunen's description of concentric production and value rings ever farther from a market center provides the general model for inquiries into land use where the transportation costs of both the inputs and the product increase with distance. Von Thunen's (1826) original description was for agricultural crops and grazing. He added wood or forestry to his model in a publication that has only become better known much later (von Thunen, 1863). Duerr (1972) and several other forestry textbooks

Data

The analysis for this paper focuses on two administrative units within the state of Acre, Baixo Acre and Purus Regionals. These accounted for 66% of Acrean timber production, including 77% of Acre's installed sawmill capacity in 2008 as this analysis was first conducted. The Brazilian Institute for Environment and Natural Resources (Ibama), the State of Acre Environment Institute (Imac), and the State of Acre Timber Firm Syndicate (Sidusmad) provided the names and addresses of all firms

Conclusion

So—the mill can afford to purchase logs of mature natural timber from as far as 113.72 km and, as these are harvested, the land manager may be able to justify sustainable forestry on land potentially even farther from the mill center/municipality. The question remains whether Acre's forest to this distance from its mills and central municipalities is sufficient to support the approximately ten mills operating in 2021 or the 20 mills operating in 2008–2010. The answer requires a return to the

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and WWF-Brazil for allowing me to use the same data in this study that I collected for a project these organizations funded in the state of Acre. I would also like to thank the University of Florida (UF), through its Tropical Conservation & Development Program and the UF School for Forest Resources and Conservation, where I developed the calculations for this study during the scholarship provided by the Betty Moore

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