Land Sparing Hypothesis

Land Sparing Hypothesis

• Agricultural intensification increases production on existing agricultural land.
• Intensification also increases production on degraded or marginal lands.
• Intensification spares other land that can be converted to agriculture.
• Land sparing involves intensive agro-industry, whereas land sharing involves family farming.
• Land sparing, which is intensive agro-industry, potentially contains downstream effects.

Concerns About Land Sparing

• Land sparing may lead to monoculture planting.
• It can increase the intensity of farming.
• There can be spillover effects of land sparing.
• Land sparing may reduce crop diversity, causing problems for adaptation.

Andrew Baldform's Perspective on Land Sparing

• Land sparing is the least bad way forward for species.
• Many species involved in land sparing are highly specialized.
• Land sparing involves sparing large areas of intact land.

Species A and B in Land Sharing and Land Sparing

• Species A represents a higher population in land sharing scenarios. Species B represents a higher population in land sparing scenarios
• Benefits and trade-offs are formalized within land sparing.
• Pay attention to the species' density yield function.
• With more intense agriculture, agricultural yield rises but species populations decline in both cases; difference lies in species' comfort levels with agricultural landscapes.
• Land sparing leads to the highest yield farming, with small, separate populations more comfortable in wildlife-friendly landscapes.

Assumptions of Models

• Assumptions include lower agriculture diversity, lower resilience, and less adaptability.
• Soil degrades and exhausts over time.
• The model assumes that farming doesn't affect species in non-farmed areas.
• Industrial agriculture has spillover effects and low connectivity, which splits populations and inhibits connection.
• Low connectivity in landscapes negatively impacts species survival

Negatives of Degraded and Marginal Lands

• Models ignore local uses, where industrial agriculture is seen as unused, with disregard for traditional and local rights.
• Social implications and the behavior of capital/society are dismissed.
• This dismissal leads to the extinction of smaller landholders and the ignoring of traditional and rights-holders' land use.
• Rebound effects assume the spared area would actually be spared.
• Socio-political objections are also dismissed.

Jevons Paradox/Rebound Effect

• Increased productivity leads to lower prices, increased consumption, and agricultural expansion.
• Jevons Paradox states increased productivity leads to increased profitability, then agricultural expansion.
• The Rebound Effect may increase further land clearing.

Political-Economic Issues with Land Use Models

• Existing consumption trends are naturalized, like meat-based consumption.
• Lowering meat consumption would lower immediate land use, naturalizing existing allocations of agricultural land for industrial use.
• The model assumes rising demand is exogenous to yield increases.
• If yield stops rising and meat becomes more expensive, people might consume less, which counters Jevons Paradox.
• Inelastic demand assumes needs will be met, and if not food, resources will be burned for biofuel or meat.
• Supply chains will continue if demand needs are met, which contradicts the rebound effect.
• There's no guarantee spared land will be used for environmental conservation because staple crops may be substituted with cash crops.
• Scales are adopted that mask displacement.
• Connections between places and capital flows are ignored.
• Specific framing is co-opted by ENGOs and the agriculture industry.
• Agriculture modernization is framed as environmentally friendly
• Conservation development is made

Land Sparing and Governance

• Before 2004, protecting forest regions was prioritized over controlling agricultural expansion.
• Has shifted the spatial logic of the Amazon, changing dynamics in the cultural space.
• Protected areas are created to encircle and constrain agriculture expansion, limiting the space around agriculture.

Land Ownership

• Producing more beef, justified by land sparing, can help rainforests.
• People are more likely to produce more if given land titles.
• Land titles provide more financial security.
• People are less likely to be forced off land/displaced to farm elsewhere

Displacements

• Forest clearing is derived outside the Amazon.
• Brazilian rangers and investment were displaced to Bolivia, hailed as rainforest conservation.
• This drives environmental destruction elsewhere.

Against Green Capitalism

• Bio-regional discoveries and reconnecting societies with their environments must be considered to avoid environmental destruction.
• Ecosystem people are those who rely on one or several ecosystems.
• Capitalism created biosphere people who consume across the biosphere without consequences, meaning there is a need to be accountable for our consumption.
• Politics and economics should be scaled to particular bioregions (bioregionalism/localism).
• Subsistence should occur in catchment areas with direct or short supply chain connections.

Analytical Considerations of Conservation

• Analyse intervention in relation to colonialism, capitalism, and territorial governance.
• Investigate the dynamics of colonialism, capitalism, and territorial governance.

Land Sparing: Key Arguments

• The use of degraded land allows for continued growth without deforestation; intensification can spare land, which would otherwise be converted to agriculture.
• Locally saves forests but displaces deforestation, which trades local conservation for global distraction.
• It is the core of the global development policy, solving agricultural growth problems and forest protection despite purporting to do it elsewhere, both productively and in consumption.
• Land use is foundational to social and economic relations, governed by a specific set of political-economic institutions, which justifies industrial development driven by commodities.
• Ecological inequality forms a cornerstone of the ecological world system analysis.
• The system coproducts productivists and the underdeveloped, evolving cyclically with ecological recovery and destruction on the same sides of the coin.
• The productive process involves complex social organization and infrastructure forms that emerge as technological change and accumulation accelerate energy flow through productive systems.
• Extraction appropriates energy and materials, causing underdevelopment.
• Increased production requires increased extraction, where accumulating wealth depends on plundering.
• Extractive regimes use political structures that enable appropriation of labor and resources, expanding frontiers and impoverishing populations.
• Productivist regimes limit domestic frontiers and commodify power and labor, promoting resource transformation and consumption where profit comes from production.
• A dialectic relationship exists together, where Indonesia is understood through its colonial/post-colonial productivist core powers to maintain resource extraction.

Case Studies

• Indonesia's land swaps with NGOs partnering with the palm oil industry attempted to shift plantation development from forested to degraded lands, though they could have better ecological function.
• Brazil's cultural invasion of Bolivians in the 2010s reflects the Brazilian transnational actors and capital that flooded into Bolivia's lowland forests as forest governance tightened.

Other Key Points

• The Brazilian Amazon saw deforestation reduction in deforestation in its complexity
• Environmental policies and agricultural practices played a factor that aligned various stakeholders, including local populations, environmentalists, and agribusiness, in response to alarming deforestation rates and pressures exerted by the Public Ministry and NGOs.
• The Brazilian government under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, specifically the appointment of Marina Silva as Minister of Environment, brought in socio-environmental movements into governance
• The resurgence of extraction and the need to revisit successful policies in the 2000s posed as a key challenge in the context of land-spearing