Search

This article examines two key aspects of land-cover change in the south of the Choco region. First, it assesses and compares the local impact on forest condition of labor-intensive and capital-intensive commercial logging. Second, it assesses the regional significance and permanency of these changes. Studies of land-cover change associated with commercial logging have focused almost exclusively on capital-intensive extraction and have assumed that after logging, degraded forests are transformed into agricultural cover. This study shows that both capital- and labor-intensive logging result in similar land-cover changes (i.e., forest degradation) if the timber sought is the same. However, labor-intensive loggers also seek timber species not sought by capital-intensive loggers, and this impact is statistically different from the impact of the extraction of the first group of species. Results also show that only a small fraction (20–30 percent) of the area logged is later converted to agricultural co...