TRADEOFFS BETWEEN RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICIES AND FOREST PROTECTION: SPATIALLY-EXPLICIT MODELING IN THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS OF VIETNAM

Alleviating rural poverty remains an important objective of development policy in many areas of the world. However, traditional means of increasing rural livelihoods such as increased investments in agricultural intensification measures can have disastrous impacts on natural resources such as forests by greatly increasing incentives for clearing. This paper contains a spatially-explicit model of land use in the Dak Lak province in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Land use is modeled using a reduced-form multinomial logit model, and policy simulations are conducted. These simulations demonstrate that the adoption of yield-increasing inputs requires concomitant forest protection policies, both in terms of forest area and spatial configuration.