Household demographic and socio-economic predictors of agricultural practices, land use and environmental degradation perception of the Paute catchment (Ecuador)

This paper seeks to improve the understanding of the household-level dynamics (life-cycle) and its relationship, through livelihood strategies, to adaptations (agricultural practices, land use change) & environmental perception focusing on long-settled communities in the Andes. In this research we have included migration as part of the household livelihood strategies (focusing on the sending place) as well as some agricultural practices and perception of environmental degradation variables considered as household adaptations. A primary data generation (the 3-Paute survey) has been carried out obtaining 239 surveyed households. Gathered data have been analyzed by the Factor Analysis for Mixed Data (FMDA), the Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components (HCPC); as well as Chi2 (test of independence), ANOVA & Kruskal-Wallis tests for measuring dependencies or relations among variables. The presented findings advance our understanding of the complex dynamics in long-settled communities in the Andes region in five ways: 1) some household life-cycle variables influence the availability of the household labor force, that in turn may impact the diversification of economic activities and cropping, the type of agriculture and cattle (subsistence, transition, or large scale), and the use of intensive (inputs) and/or extensive agriculture (deforestation); 2) gender roles are well defined in function of the production scale of agriculture and cattle; 3) we argue that household access to hired labor force and focus on profit beyond subsistence; 4) migration (out and/or in) plays an important role on the different dynamics under study mainly on wealthy households; and 5) the local livelihoods, adaptations, and environmental outcomes extend beyond a focus on macro-level to those operating at the household life-cycle level.