The Effect of Economic Development in the Clearance of Old Growth Forest Among Chimane Amerindians, Bolivia

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Anthropologists have shown that the expansion of markets into traditional societies lowers human welfare and hurts the environment, but natural resource economists have said that economic development improves conservation once people move beyond a threshold of income. This proposal tests hypotheses about market involvement and deforestation: that the amount of annual labor income or number of days spent working in non-farm jobs by a household will be negatively related to the clearance of old-growth forest, and that the share of the harvest sold or income from the sales will be positively related to the clearance of old-growth forest, and that integration through markets and cash income from the sale of crops and labor will bear a non-linear relation to forest clearance, rising at first but then declining once households passed a threshold of income. The hypotheses will be tested with data from the Chimane Amerindians in lowland Bolivia, elicited by an anthropologist, a conservation biologist, and three doctoral students of anthropology. This research will help advance our understanding of the relation between market involvement and conservation in Indigenous society, and will advance science in cultural anthropology by training students in field methods and multivariate data analysis. It will also improve our society's expertise about this important region of the world.