Understanding the Role of Livelihoods in the Adoption of Silvopasture in the Tropical Forest Frontier

The land use in the frontier of tropical forests has an important role of buffering the ecosystem and avoiding further degradation. In this frontier, extensive cattle-farming in mountainous pasture-land entails a high risk of soil erosion and biodiversity loss. This is the case in many tropical forests and the extents of the process may expand with the fragmentation of forests that causes that the perimeter of buffer zones multiplies. Silvopastoral systems are a type of agroforestry that is a compromise between cattle-farming and the buffer function of a frontier ecosystem. Despite many projects to encourage its implementation, including payments for ecosystem services, its adoption is slow. Despite being abundantly studied, there is no general consensus on the most relevant predictors for the adoption of agroforestry because, among other reasons, the type of agroforestry practice has an important influence. There are few studies that analyse silvopasture adoption, and very few which model the level of adoption beyond the commonly used binomial variable of adoption and non-adoption. In this paper, we model the participation and the short term adoption of silvopastoral systems in the context of a pilot project for planting fodder trees in the frontier area of a protected forest in Chiapas, Mexico. We gather cross-sectional data from 103 households about demography, income levels and livelihood strategies. We use secondary data about the level of adoption. We use a Heckman selection model to model both the participation and the level of adoption. The variables that influence participation in the program are different from the variables influencing the success in the activities encouraged by the program. Results also show that livelihood strategies are significant to predict participation and level of adoption, although the direction of their effect may be different for each. This has relevant implications for the design and targeting of programs for conservation in the context of development.