Smallholder policy adoption and land cover change in the southeastern Peruvian Amazon: A twenty-year perspective

The Peruvian Amazon has undergone extensive changes in land-use and land-cover changes in the last decades related to policy implementation at local to national scales. Understanding the complexity of such changes is one of the more important challenges at present and requires research approaches capable of spanning temporal and spatial scales and academic disciplines. Here, we investigate the impacts of agriculture incentives and infrastructure development in the Southeastern Peruvian Amazon using such an approach. We integrate Landsat satellite derived land-cover maps spanning the years 1986 and 2006 to understand the land-use/land-cover changes, including forest, crops and pasture, and secondary vegetation, and their implications stemming from voluntary policy adoption along the Iñapari-Iberia portion of the Inter-Oceanic highway. This road portion is one component of the broader Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure expansion, which is resulting in rapid and extensive socio-economic and biophysical changes in the region. Results from this research highlight that changes in land-cover are associated with the farmers' voluntary adoption of agricultural policies, and that policies associated with cattle expansion and credit incentives, among others, have greatly influenced forest conversion. Although land-use/land-cover change causes are manifold and linked to more than policy events, the method used in this study improves the understanding of the effects of complex policy processes in this biodiversity and culturally rich region of the Amazon.