Global land change continues to concern both scholars and the general public. Loss of tropical forest, in particular, creates significant impacts with respect to biodiversity resources and the carbon cycle. Recently, researchers have grown hopeful that countervailing processes of forest recovery, often referred to as forest transition, will mitigate environmental damage imposed by forest loss. The UN’s REDD program has served to focus attention on how to reduce deforestation and encourage forest transitions. Such policy initiatives are praiseworthy, but their ultimate success depends on uncovering the underlying drivers of land change (LC), whether forest loss or gain. Adding complexity to the policy debate are the far-reaching impacts of globalization. The dissertation seeks to add to our understanding in this regard by undertaking a national-scale study aimed at comprehending how globalization affects LC processes. Specifically, the dissertation links broad shifts in national LC dynamics with spatial shifts or re-territorialization of food commodity chains, in the context of neoliberal reforms affecting a domestic economy. It addresses the combined issues of forest loss and forest gain as they occur within the borders of an individual nation by assessing the changing territorial imprints of beef cattle and maize (M&B) production in Mexico. LC is often driven by agricultural change, so it should come as no surprise that substantial research identifies M&B production as a proximate cause of Mexican LC. However, this research goes a step further and embeds this proximate causation within the broader social structures from which it originates, namely those associated with globalized commodity chains. In doing so, the project's novel approach addresses LC through constructs drawn from Economic Geography. Two research hypotheses are advanced: (1) that the production geography of M&B commodity chains shifts over time, triggered by neoliberal reform, and (2) that shifts in source regions for both commodities explain patterns of land change across Mexico, with some areas experiencing forest transition and others deforestation. To address these hypotheses, the dissertation employs a mixed methodological approach, which includes formal and informal interviews with firms and key informants, field observations, and spatial econometrics using land use data from agricultural census and national land cover data for the years 1991 and 2007. My results suggest that neoliberal reform is redefining M&B production geography. The rise of the Mexican feedlot and the maize flour industry are intimately related with the adoption of free trade policies and transfer of prior governmental functions in the food sector to private agents. The dissertation shows that the spatial changes of the beef component of the M&B commodity network correspond in many ways to changes in forest cover. When herds diminish, there is FT; when herds expand, forests are lost. The econometric analysis confirms this pattern. Deforestation in Mexico continues to slow down, in part, with the help of large volumes of corn imports from the US and cattle smuggled from Central America.
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