With regards to my topic, the challenges facing today’s American farmers and ranchers, I have found my focus to shift specifically to the environmental challenges. That being said, one of the leading issues regarding America’s beef industry today is the fact that Americans are purchasing beef from international sources instead of local ones. This is an issue on a local level as it takes money away from our own farmers and rancher, but it is also an environmental issue as well.  The online Rural Sociology, June 2012, Volume 75, No. 2 article, “The ‘Hamburger Connection’ as Ecologically Unequal Exchange: A Cross-National Investigation of Beef Exports and Deforestation in Less-Developed Countries” by Kelly Austin goes into the reasons why beef exports are having a detrimental impact on the environment. To explain this issue, Austin describes the concept of unequal exchange and focuses on the deforestation in Latin America that has increased as a result of their growing beef industry.

Austin opens her article by explaining that unequal exchange happens when a less developed country exports goods to a more affluent country. When this happens, the affluent country gains the goods while the less developed country gains hardly anything and continues to lose resources as a result. For example, when beef is exported from Latin America, whatever profit they make needs to go to immediate needs of the ranchers and very little profit is left over. It also means that, with rising demand for Latin American beef, more ranches are popping up meaning that more deforestation is happening. There is an unequal exchange of goods happening whenever North Americans demand beef from Latin America. Based on this concept, Austin poses a hypothesis which can be summarized into two research questions: “is deforestation in less-developed countries positively associated with the relative extent to which beef exports are sent to more-developed nations? Is the impact of the vertical flow of beef exports on deforestation in Latin American nations more pronounced than in other less-developed nations?” (Austin, 2010).

Austin uses ordinary least squares regression to compare the rate of deforestation to the amount of beef being exported out of Latin America as well as how the deforestation in Latin American nations compares to other nations where deforestation happens. To gain her sample she created a list of criteria that the less-developed countries needed to fall under and she used listwise deletion to create her sample of 48 countries. After obtaining data through her research of beef export data and deforestation data, Austin used OLS regression to come to the conclusion that part of her hypothesis was correct. Deforestation in less-developed countries is positively associated with beef exports to more-developed countries and this is predominately seen in Latin America.

While this article provided interesting insights into this environmental issue, I found it incredibly confusing to follow the methods portion of the article. There were many concepts that we have not learned about yet including her methods of analysis and data collection. That being said, I was still able to understand what was being discussed and the results of the research.

Austin, Kelly. 2010. “The “Hamburger Connection” as Ecologically Unequal Exchange: A Cross-National Investigation of Beef Exports and Deforestation in Less-Developed Countries.” Rural Sociology75(2):270–99. Retrieved February 10, 2018 (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.redlands.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1549-0831.2010.00017.x/full).