Timber concessions in Madre de Dios: Are they a good deal?

Author

Renzo Giudice, Britaldo S. Soares-Filho, Frank Merry, Hermann O. Rodrigues and Maria Bowman

Ecological Economics, 2012, vol. 77, issue C, pages 158-165

Abstract: This study contributes to the design of public policies for the forestry sector in Madre de Dios, Peru. We developed a timber rent model that estimates optimal stumpage fees and compared three scenarios of harvestable areas access versus two harvest methods to calculate potential revenues to the State. We found that current stumpage fees undervalue timber resources and thus provide windfall profits to loggers. Annual forest revenues to the State could be increased from US$1 million to a maximum annual average of US$23.4±1.4 million over a 20-year period if the fee structure suggested from our estimations were adopted. Similarly, we show that the spatial distribution of current fees encourages timber harvesting outside of timber concessions, in particular from Brazil-nut concessions, which compete with timber concessions to supply timber to markets. Our results suggest that timber harvesting should be limited to a maximum volume of 5m3/ha inside Brazil-nut concessions and that timber harvesting in all Madre de Dios could be increased by up to ~200% over the next 20years without threatening conservation areas. This would in turn provide additional revenues to the State that could be applied to better monitoring and forest management.

Keywords: Stumpage fees; Timber rent; Conservation; Peruvian Amazon; Spatially-explicit modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (3) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800912000882
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link:http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:77:y:2012:i:c:p:158-165

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from  Elsevier
Series data maintained by Dana Niculescu (repec@elsevier.com).

For further details log on website :
http://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeeecolec/v_3a77_3ay_3a2012_3ai_3ac_3ap_3a158-165.htm