Researchers have shared a hopeful finding from India, showing that despite conventional wisdom, there isn’t an inherent trade-off between forest conservation and farmland. In fact, a program to dramatically expand forest cover in Rajasthan state was associated with a 24% increase in crop production, according to the new research.
“We find no evidence that expanding forested area displaces agriculture. It may even indirectly support agriculture,” says Matthew Oliver, associate professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Economics and coauthor on the paper.
The focus of the Land Economics paper is the Rajasthan Forest and Biodiversity Project, established in 2003 to expand forest cover and protect biodiversity in the Indian state. Running for seven years, the afforestation program was one of the largest in the country, involving tens of millions of trees and ultimately covering over 100,000 hectares.
The researchers were interested in whether this ambitious project had had any impact on the state’s patchwork of pearl millet, wheat, sorghum, chickpea, cotton and soybean farms.
Looking at the period before, during, and after the forest’s establishment, they explored how the expanding forest cover had affected the cultivated area, as well as its total production, and yield per hectare. They also compared this with yields in districts outside of Rajasthan to further illuminate the forest’s impact on local farms.
Perhaps surprisingly, they found that the swiftly-expanding forest did not shrink the agricultural area in Rajasthan. Even more strikingly, it seems that the forest may actually have had a positive effect on the output of those farms.
Crop yields in Rajasthan increased by an impressive 27%, reflecting a 24% increase in total production across the farmland area after the forest’s establishment, compared to farms in districts outside the state.
What led to those greater yields? The researchers noticed that the increases happened in the seven to 14 years after tree-planting began. This aligns with their theory that the maturing forest provided key ecosystem services, such as an increasing density of pollinators, that spilled over to benefit the surrounding farms.
The research revealed another interesting aspect to this: a small 2% uptick in rainfall occurred in the same period that the forest became established, between seven to 14 years after tree-planting began. The increase wasn’t statistically significant, but there were clues that it benefited the crops. Over this period, the researchers noticed a yield increase in all six of the rain-dependent crops that are farmed in Rajasthan, whereas they did not see the same trend in irrigated fields, suggesting that even the small 2% rainfall rise had an effect on those dependent crops.
It’s possible that the geophysical dynamics of the expanding forest cover brought more rainfall to the state, alongside the potential other ecosystem benefits, and collectively made farming more productive in Rajasthan. While the study doesn’t show a causal connection between the expanding forest cover and higher yields, the evidence is nevertheless convincing that farms may have something to gain from protecting forests. And, at the very least, it shows that both can co-exist, enabling the protection of biodiversity and increasing food yields at the same time.
The researchers would like future work to look into other potential benefits of reforestation, such as the cost-saving effects of the extra rainfall for farmers, and also whether it reduced local drought risk.
The findings could be “good news for carbon sequestration via forests as a climate change mitigation strategy,” Oliver says. Afforestation and reforestation are increasingly seen as approaches to shore up biodiversity, and capture carbon to mitigate climate change, and this case study shows those two goals in a rare and hopeful equilibrium with our food systems.
“We are careful not to claim that these results are generalizable to other settings. Rather, we highlight that this evidence is really the first of its kind to be documented in the literature,” Oliver says.
“Continuing research should analyze the impacts of forest expansion programs in other parts of the world, with different climates and different economic conditions, to see just how general of a result this really is.”
Kamble et. al. “Is There a Trade-Off between Forest Expansion and Agriculture? Evidence from India.” Land Economy. 2025.
Image: Harvest Plus via Flickr
