What we might be seeing here in Africa is that markets are pretty small and prices are quickly depressed by increased supply, so yeah maybe the land sparing here is unique to the region.
Yeah. In fact before I saw your message I told a colleague it would be interesting to replicate this analysis for other regions to see which effect dominates in different places.
Fair, I should have written "can lead to" or some such. But 21 African countries is a pretty extensive area.
More evidence that cheaper fertilizer leads to reduced deforestation through land sparing: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
This study explores the impact of fertilizer (urea) prices on local deforestation by exploiting the exogenous variation in the world price of urea inc…