ROADS, LAND-USE, AND DEFORESTATION - A SPATIAL MODEL APPLIED TO BELIZE

Rural roads promote economic development, but they also facilitate def orestation. To explore this tradeoff this article develops a spatially explicit model of land use and estimates probabilities of alternative land uses as a function of land characteristics and distance to marke t using a multinomial legit specification of this model. Controls are incorporated for the endogeneity of road placement. The model is appli ed to data for southern Belize, an area experiencing rapid expansion o f both subsistence and commercial agriculture, using geographic inform ation system (GIS) techniques to select sample points at 1-kilometer i ntervals. Market access, land quality, and tenure status affect the pr obability of agricultural land use synergistically, having differentia l effects on the likelihood of commercial versus semisubsistence farmi ng. The results suggest that road building in areas with agriculturall y poor soils and low population densities may be a ''lose-lose'' propo sition, causing habitat fragmentation and providing low economic retur ns.