Seminario Pepe - Juan Diego Duarte y Mauricio Velásquez
Juan Diego Duarte. Mauricio Velásquez.
The prevailing narrative attributes the surge in deforestation following Colombia’s 2016 Peace Agreement to illegality and state failure — the state was not built quickly enough to prevent illegal land appropriation. This paper proposes an alternative account: post-peace deforestation is a predictable consequence of economic development and state building reaching territories where frontier expansion had been suppressed for decades by armed conflict. In these municipalities, three conditions converge to make forest conversion the expected outcome of rational economic behavior: land is effectively free, local markets are thin so that any marginal increase in productive capital yields high returns, and the peace process dramatically reduced the risk premium associated with frontier investment. Cattle ranching—the most accessible vehicle for capital accumulation in these settings—emerges as the dominant pathway through which development-driven deforestation materializes. We formalize this logic through the concept of productive frontier saturation: the degree of prior productive incorporation relative to available forest endowment, proxied by cumulative subsidized formal agricultural credit and remaining forest cover. Using a municipal-level panel that combines administrative credit records from Colombia´s public agricultural credit system, IDEAM pixel-level forest cover data, and historical armed-group presence from the ViPAA database, we show that municipalities in the lowest quartile of pre-accord saturation experienced approximately 14% more deforestation, 63% more credit, and 73% more new borrowers after the peace transition. Crucially, historical FARC presence adds no significant explanatory power once saturation is accounted for, challenging the view that the guerrilla’s withdrawal is the proximate driver of forest loss. Subsidized agricultural credit amplifies the process but does not originate it: the underlying incentives for frontier expansion exist independently in unsaturated territories. Our findings reframe the post-conflict deforestation debate from a governance-failure story to a development story, with implications for the design of environmental and rural credit policy in forest-rich post-conflict regions worldwide.
