Global agricultural expansion cut a wide swath through tropical forests during the 1980s and 1990s. More than half a million square miles of new farmland - an area roughly the size of Alaska - was created in the developing world between 1980 and 2000, of which over 80 percent was carved out of tropical forests, according to Stanford researcher Holly Gibbs.

"This has huge implications for global warming, if we continue to expand our farmland into tropical forests at that rate," said Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Earth System Science and in the Program on Food Security and the Environment, who led the study.

Gibbs and colleagues at several other universities analyzed Landsat satellite data and images from the United Nations to reach their conclusions. Theirs is the first study to map and quantify what types of land have been replaced by the immense area of new farmland developed across the tropical forest belt during the 1980s and 1990s.

While this huge increase was happening within the tropics, agricultural land in the non-tropical countries actually decreased in area.

The study was published this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that to keep pace with increasing demand, global agricultural production will have to keep increasing, possibly even doubling by 2050. That would likely lead to millions of additional acres of tropical forest being felled over the next 40 years.

Direct impact on carbon released into atmosphere

"Every million acres of forest that is cut releases the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as 40 million cars do in a year," Gibbs said.

Most of the carbon released comes from burning the forests, but even if the trees are simply cast aside, the bulk of the carbon from the plants makes its way into the atmosphere during decomposition, she said.

Gibbs and her colleagues found that about 55 percent of the tropical forests that had been cut between 1980 and 2000 were intact forests and another 28 percent were forests that had experienced some degradation, such as some small-scale farming, logging or gathering of wood and brush for cooking or heating fuel.

"The tropical forests store more than 340 billion tons of carbon, which is 40 times the total current worldwide annual fossil fuel emissions," Gibbs said. "If we continue cutting down these forests, there is a huge potential to further contribute to climate change."

The increasing demand for agricultural production stems in part from the ever-growing number of people on the planet, who all want to eat. Additionally, members of the growing middle class in emerging economies such as China and India are showing interest in eating more meat, which further intensifies demand. And incentives to grow crops for biofuel production have increased.

But Gibbs and her colleagues also observed some encouraging signs. The patterns of change in the locations they analyzed made it clear that during the 1990s, less of the deforestation was done by small family farms than was the case in the 1980s and more was done by large, corporate-run farms. Big agribusiness tends to be more responsive to global economic signals as well as pressure campaigns from advocacy organizations and consumer groups than individual small farmers.

In Brazil, where a pattern had developed of expanding soy production by direct forest clearing and by pushing cattle ranching off pastureland and into forested areas, a campaign by Greenpeace and others resulted in agreements by key companies to rein in their expansion. Instead, they worked to increase production on land already in agricultural use.

'Seeing positive changes'

"These farmers effectively increased the yield of soy on existing lands and they have also increased the head of cattle per acre by a factor of five or six," Gibbs said. "It is exciting that we are starting to see how responsive industry can be to consumer demands. We really are seeing positive changes in this area."

Along with wiser use of land already cleared, Gibbs said, improvements in technology and advances in yield intensification also could slow the expansion of farming into the forests.

Other studies that analyzed land use changes between 2000 and 2007 have shown that the pace of cutting down the tropical forests has begun to slow in some regions.

But as long as the human population on the planet continues to grow, the pressure to put food on the table, feed in the barnyard and fuel in the gas tank will continue to grow, too.

"It is critical that we focus our efforts on reducing rates of deforestation while at the same time restoring degraded lands and improving land management across the tropics," Gibbs said. "The good news is that pressure from consumer groups and nongovernmental organizations combined with international climate agreements could provide a real opportunity to shift the tide in favor of forest conservation rather than farmland expansion."

In addition to her position at the Department of Environmental Earth System Science and the Program on Food Security and the Environment, Gibbs is affiliated with Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. Jon Foley, a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior, and director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, was Gibbs' PhD adviser when the research was begun. He is a coauthor of the paper.

Initial funding for the project was provided by NASA. Gibbs is currently funded by a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellowship.

 

Karen Eggleston, Director of the Asia Health Policy Program, seeks to hire two research assistants at the advanced undergraduate or graduate social science level to assist with several projects, including an international comparative study of government financing for health service provision and provider payment. The RA should have a solid background in microeconomics; some background in health economics and comparative health policy; and near-native fluency in English. Knowledge of another European or Asian language (especially Chinese, Japanese, or Korean) would be an advantage. Ideally the RA would be a student whose own studies are related to the topic of health care financing and payment incentives in developing and/or transitional economies, or more generally in public economics, the government sector, and social protection policies. The work would be for autumn quarter, with possibility of extension to winter quarter. Compensation is competitive and commensurate with RA experience. Please send CV and brief statement of interest and related qualifications to Karen Eggleston at karene@stanford.edu by September 24th.

Nigeria’s national oil company NNPC is at the center of a profoundly dysfunctional oil sector in a country that some argue embodies the “resource curse.” In a new study, PESD Associate Director Mark C. Thurber and PESD affiliated researchers Ifeyinwa Emelife and Patrick Heller find that NNPC’s persistent underperformance stems from its role as the linchpin of a sophisticated and durable system of patronage.

Abstract

Nigeria depends heavily on oil and gas, with hydrocarbon activities providing around 65 percent of total government revenue and 95 percent of export revenues.  While Nigeria supplies some LNG to world markets and is starting to export a small amount of gas to Ghana via pipeline, the great majority of the country's hydrocarbon earnings come from oil.  In 2008, Nigeria was the 5^th largest oil exporter and 10^th largest holder of proved oil reserves in the world according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.  The country's national oil company NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation) sits at the nexus between the many interests in Nigeria that seek a stake in the country's oil riches, the government, and the private companies that actually operate the vast majority of oil and gas projects.

Through its many divisions and subsidiaries, NNPC serves as an oil sector regulator, a buyer and seller of oil and petroleum products, a technical operator of hydrocarbon activities on a limited basis, and a service provider to the Nigerian oil sector.  With isolated exceptions, NNPC is not very effective at performing its various oil sector jobs.  It is neither a competent oil company nor an efficient regulator for the sector.   Managers of NNPC's constituent units, lacking the ability to reliably fund themselves, are robbed of business autonomy and the chance to develop capability.  There are few incentives for NNPC employees to be entrepreneurial for the company's benefit and many incentives for private action and corruption.  It is no accident that NNPC operations are disproportionately concentrated on oil marketing and downstream functions, which offer the best opportunities for private benefit.  The few parts of NNPC that actually add value, like engineering design subsidiary NETCO, tend to be removed from large financial flows and the patronage opportunities they bring. 

Although NNPC performs poorly as an instrument for maximizing long-term oil revenue for the state, it actually functions well as an instrument of patronage, which helps to explain its durability.  Each additional transaction generated by its profuse bureaucracy provides an opportunity for well-connected individuals to profit by being the gatekeepers whose approval must be secured, especially in contracting processes.  NNPC's role as distributor of licenses for export of crude oil and import of refined products also helps make it a locus for patronage activities.  Corruption, bureaucracy, and non-market pricing regimes for oil sales all reinforce each other in a dysfunctional equilibrium that has proved difficult to dislodge despite repeated efforts at oil sector reform.