Changes in farm income and land use over time in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Richard Bilsborrow, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alisson F. Barbieri, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bolier Torres-Navarrete, Georg August Universität, Göttingen

Since the 1970’s, the Ecuadorian Amazon has being occupied by increasing numbers of migrant colonist families, clearing the rainforest to establish farms. Recent changes in the region in the 1990s include continuing deforestation and in-migration, land fragmentation, changing patterns of land use and sources of income, including from more off-farm employment, and declines in overall farm household welfare and income. This paper uses a longitudinal dataset on farm households in 1990 and 1999 to a) determine the size and composition of household income from both farm and off farm sources, comparing incomes and their sources (decomposition) between survey years; b) determine the demographic and other factors associated with low farm household incomes, and of the deterioration over time in those incomes; and c) analyze the inequality in household incomes across the sample, including farm and nonfarm income, and its relationship to land inequality, using Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves.