Fertility and Farm Size: Longitudinal Evidence from the Ecuadorian Amazon

David Carr, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
William Pan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Studies worldwide have suggested that, among peasant farm households, as access to land is enhanced, fertility ascends and vice versa (Chayanov, 1986; Hawley, 1955; Stokes, Schutjer, and Bulatao, 1986; Cain, 1984; Pichon, 1997). The relationship is at the center of the population-environment interface in frontier environments where poverty, fertility, and forest conversion rates are unusually high. Yet to our knowledge no study has documented this relationship using longitudinal data in an agricultural frontier. This paper will use a subset of longitudinal data collected in 1990 and 1999 in the Ecuadorian Amazon to examine change in household landholdings and fertility. Preliminary comparisons have shown a decrease in average plot size and fertility from 43.6 to 23.3 Ha and 8.0 to 5.0 respectively, suggesting that landholdings might be a factor in decreasing fertility rates. Descriptive statistics and models will be used to explore the underlying causal mechanisms of this relationship.