A recent study by David Kaimowitz, Graham Thiele, and Pablo Pacheco on the impact of structural adjustment on deforestation and forest degradation in lowland Bolivia reached the following conclusions:
1) Bolivia’s structural adjustment policies, initiated in 1985, increased poverty among certain groups, but did not provoke widespread migration to the agricultural frontier.
2) Structural adjustment contributed to large-scale forest clearing for soybean production for export and, to a lesser extent, forest degradation by lumber companies.
3) Some forest clearing and degradation was appropriate, but steps could have been taken to reduce unnecessary environmental costs and improve the distribution of the benefits.
4) Structural adjustment did not reduce the Bolivian government’s, already weak, capacity to address these problems but it missed the opportunity to improve it.
We want you to share Forests News content, which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This means you are free to redistribute our material for non-commercial purposes. All we ask is that you give Forests News appropriate credit and link to the original Forests News content, indicate if changes were made, and distribute your contributions under the same Creative Commons license. You must notify Forests News if you repost, reprint or reuse our materials by contacting forestsnews@cifor-icraf.org.
Further reading
If you are interested in obtaining a full copy of this study, please write to David Kaimowitz, mailto:d.kaimowitz@cgiar.org
