Victoria Junquera completed her PhD on ”Crop booms in forest frontiers: Zooming in and Out"

Rapid agricultural expansion, or “crop booms”, is an important cause of deforestation globally. Yet much remains to be understood about such rapid, intense, and localized forms of agricultural expansion. Agricultural expansion is caused by drivers and triggers such as commodity price changes or regulatory changes. At the same time, local conditions and social relations affect land use decision-making. The dissertation explores the dynamics of commodity crop expansion in northern Laos in the last decades. In particular, it analyzes the processes of smallholder decision-making that led to a boom-like expansion of rubber. A major finding is that social processes of imitation and information transmission are critical in explaining the rubber boom. The dissertation further explores the impacts of cash crop expansion on livelihood vulnerability. The full dissertation is available here.