Ecosystem service tradeoffs and land-use among smallholder farmers in Eastern Paraguay

Background/Question/Methods

Conversion and fragmentation of forested land threatens the biodiverse Interior Atlantic Forest ecoregion, a source of numerous ecosystem services. Presently, many of these take the form of “provisioning services”: locally harvested food, fiber, and woody biomass. Supply of “supporting services” – nutrient cycling, soil formation, and primary productivity – is largely confined to the 13% of the ecoregion’s remaining forests. In rural Eastern Paraguay, deforestation is driven both by large-scale, commercial agriculture and ranching and by smallholder production. Smallholder land management is generally more diverse and less intensive than management of large plantations, allowing for greater retention of supporting services alongside provisioning services. Smallholder land-use is, therefore, a linchpin of sustainability in the Paraguayan Atlantic Forest.

Smallholders’ land-use options are not confined to forest preservation, row-cropping, or cattle ranching. Smallholder adoption of a variety of alternative forest crops (e.g. eucalyptus, citrus, and yerba mate) has provided ways of meeting subsistence needs while generating commercial income. In a mixed-methods case study involving 38 interviews with farming families who have invested in eucalyptus plantation forestry, I explored patterns of land-use among smallholders in Eastern Paraguay. I then modeled tradeoffs in supporting versus provisioning ecosystem services in the study system.

Results/Conclusions

Using participants’ responses about land-use and published data, I modeled the tradeoff between a supporting ecosystem service (bird species richness/ha) and a provisioning ecosystem service (gross income in USD/ha/year) on smallholder lands.  To simulate an ideal efficiency frontier, I plotted the economic value of predicted provisioning services against that of predicted supporting services for maximally efficient subdivisions of smallholders' parcels into cash cropping, eucalyptus plantation, natural forest, and cattle ranching. Comparison with observed smallholder land-use patterns showed that smallholders allocate space to these land-use classes inefficiently – neither provisioning nor supporting service provision is optimized.

Consideration of the modeled efficiency frontier and participants’ realized practices of forest resource management suggests that investment in subsistence farming, cattle ranching, and less valuable cash crops leads to inefficient trade-offs between supporting and provisioning services. Most study participants could augment the quantities of both provisioning and supporting services produced on their parcels by using land more efficiently. These families could benefit from increased capitalization and technical assistance to facilitate investment in land-uses that both provide for both higher economic yields and increased biodiversity protection.