A village-level economic model of land clearing, grazing, and wood harvesting for sub-Saharan Africa: with a case study in southern Senegal

A village-level dynamic, stochastic, and non-linear programming model, incorporating both economic and ecological aspects, is developed to study the complex woodland degradation processes in the sub-Saharan Africa. The emphasis is on simultaneous accounting of the effects of three major causes of woodland degradation, namely, land clearing, grazing, and extraction done for wood fuel, poles and charcoal, that has not been attempted before. The model is applied at the village level in Senegal and run for the period 1999–2020. By running different model scenarios, a number of hypotheses are tested about woodland degradation as measured through loss of vegetative biomass per unit of land. While demographic pressure was found to aggravate the woodland degradation processes, introduction of improved agricultural technology, higher cotton prices, increased rural wages, and reduced charcoal prices were found to retard the process of degradation. On the basis of the findings of this study, therefore, the role of policy makers in devising appropriate demographic and economic policies to retard the process of woodland degradation appears to be important in the sub-Saharan African nations with conditions similar to those found in Senegal.