Population-Environment dynamics in Latin America

Unprecedented population growth attended equally unprecedented land use and land cover changes in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century, affecting the food security of thousands of agriculturally based communities. The more than doubling of the population of Latin America was accompanied by rural migration to urban areas, and extensification of agricultural land at the expense of forest and natural environments (Carr, Lopez, and Bilsborrow 2009). As population growth continues and the most suitable potential agricultural land diminishes, has intensification followed on the heels of extensification and, if so, has production risen concomitantly? We use data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) to examine trends in population, agricultural intensification and food production Latin America from 1961-2011. Results indicate rising population (with slowing growth rates) accompanied by soaring intensification in the form of increased fertilizer and mechanization. However, there is no linear relationship between agricultural input and output. Rather, the results point to a Malthusian pattern: inputs increasing exponentially, while outputs increase at best arithmetically.

The main goal of this paper is to discuss the relationship between population growth, rising living standards, food consumption patterns, urbanization and the trends in the use of water in the two most populous countries in Latin America: Brazil and Mexico. Although it only comprises 8% of the global population, Latin America constitutes an ideal case to observe population changes, with 79.1% of the population is living in cities (UN, 2011). Cities in this continent show a rate of expansion surpassing the rate of population growth; and the trend is projected to continue in the coming decades, which will increase competition for land, water and other natural resources. Besides, significant changes in consumption patterns have been observed over the last decades, along with the growth of the middle class in many countries across the region. By 2050 population growth and the increasing living standards in much of the world will contribute to increasing food demand by 70%. Latin American countries are most likely going to play a vital role in food production and need to asses important natural resources trade-offs.

Household energy consumption has increased in Mexican urban areas over the last 20 years. Explanations point, on the one hand, to changes on household wealth and, on the other hand, to life style transformations towards more energy intense everyday practices. We argue that disentangle these effects requires a cohort-period analysis since it is necessary to separate increments on income at older ages from those increases related to country wealth (period) and generational differences in consumption patterns. To examine these effects, we pooled multiple years of the Income and Expenditure Household Surveys (1992-2008), and we build synthetic cohorts to implement a hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis (HAPC) of household energy consumption in urban Mexico. After documenting the presence of cohort differences in energy consumption (Sanchez y Jasso 2012), this paper examines a) if changes Mexico´s economic wealth impacts household energy consumption, and b) whether such adjustment differs across cohorts.

We examine how land use and livelihoods over time in the Brazilian Amazon is explained by households´ demographic composition and sources of income and welfare, and stages of frontier development. We build on the "household and land use life cycle" and the "household livelihoods" theories to relate land use and land cover change to the many components of colonists´ decision-making, individual aspirations of income and welfare and collective needs of familiar group(s) in rural settings, and how they are mediated by the context in which these decisions are made. We use a unique panel of plots and households based on field surveys carried out in the municipality of Machadinho in 1985 (288 farm households), 1986 (552 farm households), 1987 (808 farm households), 1995 (1,079 farm households), and 2010 (a sample of 259 farm households). In order to understand livelihoods dynamics we estimate cross-section and panel latent class models (Grade of Membership), this last to estimate conditional transitional probabilities from one livelihoods to others over time. We finally discuss how changing livelihood options are impacted and have consequences depending on the scale of analysis and their challenges for public policies regarding sustainable livelihoods, development and land use in the Amazon.