Bringing economic development for whom? An exploratory study of the impact of the Interoceanic Highway on the livelihood of smallholders in the Amazon

Significant research efforts have been devoted to characterizing smallholding productive systems and assessing the relative contribution of small-scale farming to global food production. However, there is a noted paucity of studies addressing the determinants of and contributors to income generation of smallholders around the world, particularly in the Amazon forest. Moreover, while road development in the Amazon has been heavily discussed, the impacts of infrastructure projects, such as road paving, on smallholders' livelihoods remain uncertain. Here we explore the relevance of agriculture, livestock rearing and collection of non-timber forest products (NTFP) as income providers of smallholders in the Amazon forest in Madre de Dios-Peru, after the paving of Interoceanic South Highway (ISH), a large infrastructural project connecting Acre state in Brazil with Cusco in Peru. We interviewed 62 smallholder families in an area of 403 km(2) along the road from Inapari to Mazuko near the tri-national border of Brazil, Peril and Bolivia. We applied a multinomial statistical model to estimate the proportion of annual net revenue related to each productive system from selected predictor variables. Our results show that smallholders' net revenue originates from a mix of productive systems including agriculture (rice, corn), livestock rearing (cows) and others (poultry, pigs, sheep) as well as NTFP extractivist activities (Brazil nut). Average net revenue is of USD 35.2 +/- 25.7 ha(-1)yr(-1) suggesting that economic returns to smallholders remain low even after the paving of ISH. This indicates that connection with markets alone is not sufficient to increase rents of smallholder families.