This research builds on a previous project, "Property Rights and Land Use on the Brazilian Frontier", by examining the circumstances under which violence occurs in providing property rights to land in the Amazon and its economic impact on land values, land use and investment, and tenure. This is an important topic because secure land tenure increasingly is viewed as an important condition for investment and how natural resources are ultimately exploited, particularly forests and biodiversity in developing countries. The question arises, what policies will provide tenure routinely to support economic development and when is the process likely to lead to conflict and violence with the dissipation of economic rents and over exploitation of natural resources? For a people who are poor by most standards and for a region with rich natural resources, tenure policies and their potential link to violence in the Amazon is a critical issue in need of further scientific study. This project involves collecting and analyzing two unexploited sources of data on violence and land tenuring. Using these data along with other census data, the interaction among violence, land value, tenure, and investment will be examined. The analysis will involve a two stage econometric technique that has been developed to examine the simultaneous relationships among land value, tenure, investment, and violence. Additional data will also be collected from secondary sources on policy formation regarding Amazon settlement and tenuring. In addition, land claimants will be surveyed in a region which enjoyed major government subsidies for ranching and also experienced the most deaths from violent conflict over land between 1970-1985. These subsidies are important because they significantly raised expected land rents and may have encouraged rapid and conflicting settlement of the region by both ranchers and by small claimants or squatters. Moreover, land agencies responsible for titling, may not have provided secure title to land in a timely fashion. which would have added to chaotic and over exploitation of the land and its natural resources. *** From these surveys and the analysis of the results, we can determine the conditions under which violence over property rights to land occurs and its impact on land value and investment. Tailandia will provide a time-series data set on settlers (tenure, plot size, land value, investment, age, sex, education and other socio-economic characteristics, distance to market, wealth) from 1992 through 1996/1997 that will be valuable to other researchers. We already have assembled survey data for six sites for 1992-93 for 249 small holders. The resurvey of part of this group will allow us to observe changes in turnover and consolidation, investment, and land value. With increased economic growth in Brazil in general, we expect greater activity in the Amazon. The Amazon in Brazil is still largely unsettled and covered with forest. Recent estimates from land satellite imagery indicate that approximately 10 percent of the Brazilian Amazon is deforested. It is thus not too late for policy to affect the fate of much of the region. Much has been written about the settlement of the Amazon and the attendant conflict associated with it. What is lacking is documentation as to where and when conflicts arose and an analysis of the determinants and impact of violence. The research team has developed skills and knowledge of the region, tenuring policies, primary and secondary data sources, and survey technqiues.
