Copyright by Mario Luis Cardozo 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Mario Luis Cardozo Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Smallholder Livelihoods and Market Accessibility in the Peruvian Amazon Committee: Kelley A. Crews, Co-Supervisor Kenneth R. Young, Co-Supervisor Karl W. Butzer Chandler Stolp Brian King Smallholder Livelihoods and Market Accessibility in the Peruvian Amazon by Mario Luis Cardozo, Titulo; M.S. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Dedication To my niece Paloma and my nephew Octavio. May all of your dreams come true. Acknowledgements I owe so much to my family. My parents Livia and Freddy, my siblings, also named Livia and Freddy, my sister-in-law Rosanna, and my niece Paloma and nephew Octavio have provided insurmountable support of many kinds. You all have been great friends participating with me in welcomed fun distractions and always encouraging me to carry on with my academic pursuits, especially when I needed the solace of your company and love the most. You are all so hard working, accomplished, compassionate, strong, responsible, creative, and so many other wonderful things, that you have been an inspiration to me all along. I feel honored to be your son, brother, brother-in-law, uncle, and friend. I could repeat similar sentiments when referring to my UT family. During my years in the Geography department I have met and become friends with a number of classmates, professors, and staff members who are now among the people I cherish and respect the most. The list is long, and I apologize for any omissions. First, I would like to thank first my co-advisers Ken Young and Kelley Crews. I would have never been where I am (and I love where I am) if it were not for your perseverance in getting me through my studies, especially during moments when I doubted myself and my work. I am so happy and feel so honored to have worked with you during these years. It will be a strange adjustment to not be able to consult you on the things I do. I have enjoyed not only developing my own Amazon research with you, but also learning about your exciting work in Thailand, the Andes, Botswana, and other places. I am a big fan of your academic work! I hope you know I am forever indebted to you, and that I will do v anything, anytime for you, because that is what you have done for me during these years at UT, working so hard to help me in every possible way and pushing me to be a better researcher, teacher, and person. I imagine it was not always easy to deal with me, but the both of you only showed me kindness and encouragement. Your dedication and creativity related to teaching and research are admirable. You are also wonderful people who inspire me well beyond your academic and professional accomplishments. I would also like to thank all other professors and lecturers from the department, especially those with whom I took classes and those for whom I worked as teaching assistant, including, besides my advisers, Karl Butzer, Greg Knapp, Bill Doolittle, Leo Zonn, Peter Dana, Brian King, Francisco Pérez, Rich Heyman, Amy Neuenschwander, C. Shane Davies, Paul Hudson, and Jennifer Miller. I enjoyed being in your classes and getting to know about your research. I learned so much from being your student and teaching assistant. I would like to particularly thank Greg Knapp for introducing me to different theoretical perspectives on conservation and development in Latin America. Thank you also for helping me with and caring about my professional development, both as chair of the department and as graduate adviser. I am also grateful to Professor Paul Adams, the current graduate adviser, for all his help this past year. As an international student, I think I have required some extra care from the department. I would have been lost without James Gunther, Teal Reid, and Natalie Boudreau. Thank you for your friendly disposition and for helping me with so many issues that it would be hard to list them all here. I am especially thankful to Dee Dee Barton. You have become very important to me, and I cannot thank you enough for all the support and love you have given me. You were always available to listen to me, give me personal and academic advice, and to support my many requests for complicated vi administrative things that I needed to go through for being an international student and taking longer than average to complete my degree. Dee Dee, thank you so much for your patience, nurturing nature, your wisdom, and your unconditional support and friendship. I am very grateful to my committee members. It is a true honor to have had Karl Butzer in my committee. You have influenced my research in profound ways. As I was doing fieldwork, the conversations we had about cultural and political ecology perspectives and researcher positionality resonated in unexpected ways. Thank you, Brian King, for providing much insight and bibliographic references that helped me theoretically contextualize much of my research, especially case studies presented in Chapters 6 and 7. I am also very grateful to Chandler Stolp for helping me with statistical analyses, from thinking of what kind of analyses to do, to showing me how to interpret results, especially for Chapters 5 and 6. Your insights on the policies implications of my research were also valuable. Data analysis and writing for Chapter 6 were funded by a graduate fellowship from the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). The graduate fellows present during the author’s stay at PERC, Adrienne Ohler, David McClintick, Monique Dutkowsky, Lisa Pfeiffer, and Adam Novick, provided insightful comments on early versions of the Chapter. The analyses in Chapter 6 would have not been possible without the inspiration and advising of PERC senior fellows Daniel K. Benjamin, Peter J. Hill, and Walter N. Thurman. I would like to acknowledge that fieldwork for this dissertation was funded by the National Science Foundation (Geography and Regional Science, project BCS-0623229), the Tinker Foundation, and The University of Texas at Austin through travel grants from the Department of Geography and the Environment and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute vii of Latin American Studies. I thank these institutions for helping me live for more than a year in the Peruvian Amazon in order to collect data for this dissertation. There are too many people I met in Iquitos who help me with my research and became dear friends. I need to thank first Daniel Sánchez, Jimmy Laiche, and especially Yully Rojas, for their assistance in the interview campaign. Yully, you also became a dear friend, and you were the one field assistant I could always rely on and who contributed so much to the process of improving interviewing techniques, also providing insights on smallholder agriculture thanks to your knowledge and background in agronomy. Thank you and your family also for your hospitality. I would also like to thank the many government and non-profit organization officers who helped me with my research in many ways, including allowing me to interview them, and visiting them repeatedly for more information. Luis Limachi (IIAP) provided valuable insights about the development of the Iquitos-Nauta Road, and other aspects of smallholder development in the department of Loreto. I would also like to thank José Alvarez (IIAP) for sharing with me his perspectives on conservation and smallholder development in the Nanay Basin. Aura Murrieta (ACEER) was instrumental in the research conducted in the Itaya Basin, even providing transportation during field visits to Itaya communities. I would also like to thank the many friends I made in Iquitos and nearby communities, including Lilia Paz, Jyl Lapachin, Michael Gilmore, Kathryn Metz, Lucio Perleche, Jorge Martín, Sanni Saarinen, Mónica Hernández, Rosa Vázquez, among many others. It was very nice to explore Iquitos together, and share so many fun activities with you, in addition to receiving so much encouragement from all of you to continue to do my fieldwork. I could not have gone through all these years without the support of my friends. Montse Carbonell and Professor Theodore Mealor (University of Memphis) insisted that viii I furthered my graduate studies at UT and provided much support and encouragement to transition from my master’s studies in the Pantanal region to my doctoral research in the Peruvian Amazon. I am also very grateful to all of my classmates at UT and other friends I met at the department, including Nancy Aguirre, Lars Pomara, Julio Postigo, Augustine Avwunudiogba, Ophelia Wang, Blanca León, Mariana Montoya, Joomi Lee, Thoralf Meyer, Maraigh Mills, Niti Mishra, Anna Mueller, Leigh Schwartz, Katherine Evans, Shari Wilcox, Molly Polk, Ed Park, Ingrid Haeckel, Otho Vásquez, among many others. You have all been great friends for a long time now. Thank you for pushing me and encouraging me through all these years. I am particularly indebted to past and current members of the Digital Landscape Lab, for sharing the work space and helping me advance my academic pursues, from English issues to analyses and research questions. The DLL has included (besides, Julio, Niti, Ophelia, Augustine, and Molly), Alex Biggs, Justin Laue, Jennifer Alexander, and Xuebin Yang. I am particularly grateful to my friend Julio for sharing endless days and nights at the lab, inspiring me with his (hard) work ethic, academic rigorousness, and knowledge about so many aspects of Peru and smallholders.