Evaluating the long-term impacts of promoting green agriculture in the Amazon

Frontier development in the Brazilian Amazon has created vast areas of largely deforested landscapes. Conservation efforts in these post-frontier zones seek to protect the remaining forest fragments and promote sustainable agricultural practices that absorb labor, meet market demand, and generate ecosystem services. Assessments of these efforts often find that rates of sustained uptake are disappointingly low and that impacts are difficult to discern, but this could be due to the short-time frames of both the efforts themselves and their evaluation. We investigate the impacts of participation in an internationally sponsored farmer association that for 15 years promoted sustainable agricultural practices in the heavily deforested state of Rondonia, Brazil. Using data from a georeferenced four-period panel survey of farmers in combination with remote sensing data on land use spanning the life of the association, we apply matching methods to estimate the impacts of participation. We find that membership resulted in more diversified production systems, including more land allocated to agroforestry. Members also deforested less of their farms, but this difference is not statistically significant after we control for selection bias in membership.