Socio-Legal Discussion Group: Land Property Law and Deforestation: A Socio-Legal Study in the Agricultural Frontiers of the Peruvian Amazon

Law and tropical deforestation are connected. Deforestation accounts for the largest source of CO2 emissions in many tropical countries of the Global South, such as Peru. The literature on deforestation shows that agricultural expansion is one of its most important direct causes, itself driven by varied indirect factors such as demographic, economic, institutional, and policy-related, including property rights arrangements. However, this scholarship from disciplines like environmental geography, agricultural economics, or political ecology, has yet to adequately consider the role law in general, and of land tenure legal norms in particular. A socio-legal lens is useful to get a better understanding of how property law operates in agricultural frontiers of tropical forests to produce deforestation. This presentation will discuss the preliminary findings of my doctoral research in Soritor, a district in the Peruvian Amazon, a frontier space partially out of the reach of government control. There, thousands of migrant farmers come from the Andean highlands in search of available land, taking pristine forest and settling in new communities in a process of illegal occupation without access to formal land rights. In doing this, they circumvent land tenure and forest protection regulations and use social norms and private law to take land, transfer it, and use it, transforming a public forest into an agricultural landscape of private property owners.