Consequently, we should expect the agriculture land to expand in the future, particularly in tropical countries. Second, to compensate for the land scarcity, the future trend will consist of stabilizing and intensifying the agriculture practices which policy options are not without social and environmental risks. Some of these risks are the deforestation, which is tangible here in Central Togo, and others experienced in other situations such as permanent lands’ exhaustion and the inability of the farmer producer to payback the investment costs, associated to the past American and Russian agriculture. To achieve the conservation objectives, Boucher et al.simply suggest a reduction of the demand for these international commodities. But how this suggestion can be implemented? Concerning the wood supply in the study area, whether for the fuel wood or the industrial wood, the empirical analysis does not show a clear correlation pattern with the deforestation. The reason may be multiple but the essential ones are that the forestry practice in Togo is a selective cutting which does not lead directly to deforestation, but to forest degradation and. Another reason is the wood data sources. Indeed, the control posts for wood shipping, from where most data originate, do not record data from the sole prefecture of its jurisdiction,but from many other sources, even data on wood shipped from beyond the country’s borders.

However, all the models display negative effects of the payoff from illegal cutting, am and, on land conservation.Likewise, the whole stand cutting is also becoming a common practice. Individuals would approach the forest offices pretending to establish a farm on a particularl and, which moves owe them the right to cut permit. There are many other twisted ways as such that allow getting around the regulations that cannot be revealed by statistical empirical analyses. Overall, these findings do not express the reality of the field simply due to the reasons discussed throughout the paragraph and many others we cannot enumerate in the context of the study. The fertilizer quantity supply in the Central Togo for cotton farming significantly decreases the annual area allocated to yam cultivation. The quantity of fertilizer used in food farming does not show a significant effect but the negative sign of the slope estimator shows a decrease inland allocated to yam production as the fertilizer quantity increases moible grow rack. This resultap parently confirms our original hypothesis that an intensification of agriculture increases the agriculture yield and thereby lessens the deforestation. But our data have not shown any increase in the cotton yield in the Central Togo during our study time period. As presented in Figure 2 below, it has remained relatively stable between 0.8 tons and 1.2 tons per hectare with just two peaks of 1.9 tons per hectare in 1998 and 2009.

Another explanation may be that the fertilizer supply has a motivation effect,meaning that its supply has led more and more farmers into cotton farming.This interpretation is not relevant either because in such case the fertilizer would have had an increasing effect on forest land loss and . The most relevant explanation of the decreasing effect of the fertilizer input on deforestation is that it has helped the reuse of abandoned farm lands for cropping instead of starting new farms from scratch according to the farm establishment process which consists of cutting down forests, planting yam in the first year, and then cropping other crops the following years, a process described above. This reuse of old farm lands for cropping is true for cotton as well as for any other crops like maize whose farming relies on fertilizer input. Indeed, under the traditional farming practice , the shifting cultivation is linear because the soil could sustain no more than three years of cultivation. But the introduction of the intensive cotton farming in Togo has allowed the reuse of the abandoned land for both cotton and maize cultivation. The maize has been favored because the farmer has discreetly used the fertilizer for maize cultivation before its official introduction in recent years. Indeed, the farmer would receive an amount of fertilizer supposing to destine it for cotton farming, but he diverts an important part of the fertilizer supplied by the cotton society tomaize farming. Not only such twisted practice has extended the time period of cropping on the same land, but also has it raised the maize yield from less than or equal to 750 kg per hectare during the years prior to 1980, to more than one ton an hectare after.