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| RAINFOREST LIBRARY |
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| Why are Rainforest being Destroyed? |
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| The eight major reasons for this ongoing destruction of the worlds Rainforests
are as follows. |
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| 1. INTERNATIONAL LOGGING |
| Every year 12 million acres of Rainforest are destroyed by logging. Of the 50 largest inter-
national logging companies, 22 are Japanese and Japan is the world's largest consumer of
tropical woods. Although Japan's population is only 7% of the world's, it disproportionately
consumes a staggering 52% of total tropical timber exports, followed by China with 14.8% and
South Korea 12.8%. Thus just three Asian countries consume nearly 80% of all the tropical woods
logged from the Rainforest and must bear a heavy responsibility for its destruction. Japanese
Banks and Multi-National Corporations are heavily involved in financing the destruction of the
Rainforests in order to feed their insatiable demand for wood. Having logged out the Philippines
Thailand and to a great extent Indonesia, now Japanese and Indonesian logging companies are
turning to Latin America, in particular Brazil and Peru, and even to such unexploited areas as
Belize, in order to maintain their supply. Attempts at reforestation and tree plantations often
fail to keep pace with this rapid rate of deforestation, resulting in an ever widening gap, with
some cases, such as in Africa, of only 1 tree being replanted for every 29 cut down. This
critical imbalance means that most of the World's Rainforests will be extinct within the next
25 years. |
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| 2. SLASH AND BURN CULTIVATION |
| Thousands of years ago, the ancestors of the human race were hunter-gatherers, who depended
on hunting wild game and gathering wild fruits, nuts and berries for their sustenance. They knew
nothing of agriculture, but their descendents eventually learned to plant crops for food and
this was the beginning of slash and burn cultivation. In order to clear the primeval forest to
plant crops, indigenous peoples cut and burned the trees and undergrowth. The resulting cleared
patch of land was then used for agriculture. This may have been successful in temperate climates
but in tropical Rainforests the soil is so poor in nutrients that, after two or three years, the
land which has been cleared becomes infertile. The nutrient derived from the ash of the initial
burning is temporary. Torrents of rain continue to fall, and without the presence of the tree
canopy to shield the ground, or of decomposing leaves and debris falling from the trees to cover
and enrich the forest floor, the heavy tropical rains wash away the topsoil and nutrients,
flushing them into nearby streams and rivers, which carry them out to sea. The result is that
after two or three crops, the peasant farmer, unable to afford fertilizers, must abandon his
plot of land and start the cycle over once again, somewhere else in the Rainforest.
This pattern of "shifting" or "swidden" agriculture, has always been detrimental to the
Rainforest, to some degree, resulting in soil erosion and degradation. Yet in the past, it was
mostly on a small scale, and peasant cultivators, occupied very small plots of land, practising
crop rotation and diversification. All this has changed. In the Third World, the explosion in
population growth in recent years, combined with the fact that most of the agricultural land is
owned by a small, wealthy elite, means that for millions of landless peasants in Brazil and
other Third World countries, their only hope of obtaining land is to seek it deep in the jungles
Unfortunately, in many cases, these "settlers" are drawn from the urban poor of overcrowded
city slums, who know little if anything of agriculture, and who are often doomed to failure in
their attempts at peasant farming. Poverty-stricken, illiterate and afflicted by tropical
diseases in the Rainforest, they suffer high rates of infant mortality, sickness and deformity,
leading to miserable lives and early deaths, in an existence as degraded as the ruined forest
surrounding them. These tragic, migrant cultivators, moving from one failed plot to another,
slashing and burning as they go, are estimated to destroy over 8.4 million acres of Rainforest
a year, second only to the International logging companies and even more than is attributed to
Cattle Ranching. In fact all three are linked in a trinity of destruction. The logging companies
usually being followed by the peasant cultivators, who in turn are replaced by the cattle
ranches. It is a sad trilogy. |
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| Even more tragic is that millions of these poor people are being officially relocated to
the Rainforests by their respective Governments, in a well-meaning, but misguided scheme to
alleviate the increasing problem of population growth and land shortages, which is now reaching
crisis proportion in many Third World countries. In Brazil, under the slogan "Land without
People for People without Land", the Government sought to diffuse rising political tensions
and a spiralling crime rate in the overcrowded cities of Rio de Janiero, Sao Paulo and Receife,
and growing dissent over land reform in the countryside, by unveiling a plan to encourage some
5 million of Brazil's poor to re-settle as "colonists" in Brazil's Amazonian province of
Rondonia. This grand plan has of course been a miserable failure, with nothing to show for it
but the widespread destruction of the Brazilian Rainforest. In Indonesia, at least 2.5 million
poor people have been relocated by the Government, forced to move from the densely populated
islands of Java, Madura and Bali, to remote jungle regions of Sumatra, Kalimantan, Maluku and
Irian Jaya. At least another 5 million people are estimated to have migrated and re-settled in
these areas without Government financial assistance, but as a direct or indirect result of the
Transmigration Programme. As a means of relieving population pressure on Java, the programme
has been ineffective, since, despite a family planning campaign, the birth rate on Java still
exceeds the rate of migration. Nothing has been accomplished. Instead the result has been the
accelerated destruction of thousands of acres of Rainforest by the Indonesian Government,
without any benefit to anyone. |
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| 3. CATTLE-RANCHING |
| The 20th Century has seen a huge increase in demand by the United States and other Western
countries for cheap beef to be processed into both fast foods, to feed their growing populations,
and animal feeds for an increasing number of farm animals and household pets. The Developed
World has only one-quarter of the Earth's population, but consumes nearly two-thirds of all the
meat produced on the planet, while the Third World, with three-quarters of the Earth's
population receives less than one-third of what is left. The result of this enormous, ever-
increasing demand for cheap beef, especially in the form of hamburgers, is that in many poor
Third World Countries, landowners, greedy to make quick fortunes, have destroyed enormous areas
of Rainforest in order to make way for vast cattle ranches. The terrible irony is that few of
these cattle ranches have been profitable in the long run. The thin, fragile soil and torrential
rains of the Tropical Rainforest, result in coarse, wiry grasses, so deficient in nutrition,
that it takes nearly 3 acres of pasture to support a single cow. This low-grade pasture is
quickly overgrazed, the soil trampled, oxidized and sunbaked and soon overun with toxic weeds.
Weed-killers and fertilizers have not proved cost-effective solutions and the cattle are plagued
by a variety of tropical parisites. In 3 to 5 years these cattle ranches are worn out and
useless and since it takes 4 years to fatten a cow for slaughter, and few cows reach the premium
weight, the profit margin is slim. After 5 years most of these marginal cattle ranches are
simply abandoned, the wealthy owners accquire several thousand more acres of Rainforest, burn
and destroy it and begin the cycle of destruction all over again. Cattle ranching has been
responsible for 72% of all Rainforest destroyed in Brazil up to 1980 and is now the major cause
of deforestation in Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and many other countries in
Latin America. In fact for every quarter-pounder hamburger you eat, you have just helped to
destroy 67 square feet of Rainforest. Cattle-ranching has been described as "the least product-
ive use of the land and the worst environmental alternative in the wet tropics". Yet in 1990,the
journal Cultural Survival Quarterly estimated that "at least two-thirds of Central America's
arable land in now devoted to cattle production". Why is this so if profits from cattle-ranching
in Latin America are so marginal? The truth is that most wealthy owners of cattle ranches in
Latin America don't make their fortunes from cattle. In fact most cattle ranches in the Amazon
region of Brazil have been total failures, almost half of them have never sold a single cow, and
one out of every three of these cattle ranches has been abandoned. The truth is that the owners
of these unprofitable cattle ranches have reaped a small fortune in Government subsidies and by
land speculation. The Brazilian Government, backed by American and European Banks, the World
Bank, and even the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has provided over
U.S. $4 Billion in subsidized loans, at negative interest rates, for beef-production expansion.
The added benefits of 100% tax holidays for up to 17 years, vast grants of free land and
Government financial subsidies of up to 72% of operating costs, have meant that the owners of
the cattle ranches, many of which are American and European Banks and Corporations, who have
never even seen a cow or been to the Amazon, have often received up to 250% profit on their
investment, even while the cattle ranches and the Brazilian Government have been consistently
losing money. In 1990 it was estimated that the Brazilian Government had suffered a fiscal loss
of U.S. $2.9 Billion due to its policies in support of the cattle barons of the Amazon, which is
one of the major contributing factors to its current economic crisis. Meanwhile, millions of
acres of Amazonian Rainforest have been burned and destroyed so that a few wealthy bankers and
business tycoons could pull a scam and line their pockets with millions of dollars at everyone
else's expense. |
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| 4. FUELWOOD COLLECTION |
The demand for fuelwood is one of the major causes in the destruction of the Rainforest in
Third World Countries. In 1990 it was stated by Maharaj K. Muthoo, former Director of FAO's
Forestry Operation Service, that almost 2 billion people depended on fuelwood for cooking and
heating, consuming 85% of all wood produced in the Third World. Of these, an estimated 96
million people only had enough fuelwood to cook one hot meal a day and another 1,052 million
found it necessary to forage for wood. on an average, each person in the developing countries
consumes over 16 cubic feet of wood a year. The amount of fuelwood collected from foraging each
year is estimated to be four times the volume of the total world timber trade. In India, for
example, over 50 million tons of fuelwood a year are harvested from her forests. Brazil's
fuelwood consumption is estimated to be equal to U.S. $3 Billion a year in foreign exchange.
It is significant that studies have shown that one person may forage fuelwood from 1.2 acres
of Rainforest for a year without degrading the habitat. Yet in the Himalayan region of India,
surveys show that no less than seven persons compete for fuelwood in the same space of 1.2
acres, thus creating an impossible burden for sustained use, causing irrevocable damage to the
eco-system and negating any possibility of future regrowth. The Worldwatch Institute in
Washington D.C. reported in 1990 that many Third World nations are entering a "wood famine"
and the FAO predicts that by the year 2,000, some 2,400 million people in developing nations
will be affected. One only has to look at Haiti, where the cutting down of trees, to make
charcoal for fuel, led to mass deforestation, soil erosion, river silting and dying costal
reefs and sealife, to predict what the future holds for us unless a solution is found to this
critical problem. Even more disturbing is the discovery that in order to compensate for
shortages of wood, it has now become a widespread practise amongst the poor in India to use
dried cow-dung as a substitute fuel, thus robbing their fields and rice-paddies of much needed
fertilizer and nutrients. This practise has unfortunately spread to other Third World countries
and it is estimated that now each year some 400 million tons of dung are burned as fuel in areas
where firewood is scarce or nonexistent. This loss of fertilizer, which previously would have
been used in the fields, has resulted in a loss of more than 14 million tons of grain a year,
a figure twice the amount of that shipped by aid organizations every year. |
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| 5. PLANTATIONS |
The development of large-scale plantations to grow export crops has always required extensive
areas of fertile land and these have been obtained at the expense of the Rainforest. This was
particularly true of costal plains and inland valleys and plateaus, where the forest was
completely cleared to make way for sugar, banana, coconut, tobacco, cotton, rubber, indigo and
other plantations. The more inaccessible mountains were spared, until the development of tea and
coffee planations resulted in the deforestation of the highlands of Assam, Ceylon, Kenya, Haiti,
Jamaica, Java and a dozen other such places. In the Third World, Governments eager for all the
trappings of "development" and seeking to increase their balance-of-payments through exports,
often encourage the establishment of new plantations and few limitations are placed on them
with respect to the Environment. The most extreme example of this lack of Government regulation
is the wide-spread and careless burnings of millions of acres of Rainforest in Malaysia and
Indonesia in 1998, who wished to clear the jungle for vast palm-oil and other plantations, no
matter the damage they wreaked on the Environment and their fellow-citizens. In Latin America
and Jamaica large areas of the Rainforest are being ruthlessly destroyed to make way for large,
new coffee plantations, which are being established in response to the 1990s boom in coffee
houses in the United States. So the next time you ask for a cappucino or a mocha in your trendy
neighbourhood Coffee Bar, just remember that you just heped contribute to the destruction of
another acre of Rainforest and all the animals and birds in it. Somehow, I guarentee, that
coffee, just wont taste the same. |
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| 6. MINERAL EXTRACTION |
Though mining is a relatively minor cause of deforestation, the construction of access roads
and demand for labour, as well as increasing development, often attracts landless peasants to
the region, with the usual devestating results to the surrounding Rainforest. However a plan
by the Brazilian Government to establish 18 pig-iron smelting plants in the Amazon is cause for
grave concern. The Grande Carajas Programme will cost an estimated U.S. $70 Billion and cover
an area the size of France. The 18 smelters will be fuelled with charcoal produced by trees cut
down from the surrounding Rainforest. It is estimated that they will consume a staggering 900
square miles of Rainforest per year. |
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| 7. HYDROELECTRIC PROJECTS |
The construction of Hydroelectric Dams have always been accompanied by controversy in the
Developing Nations. Often seen as symbols of progress and modern technology, they have sometimes
become the ambitious pet projects of Third World Governments eager to leave lasting monuments to
their own vainglory. There is no doubt that in many cases such projects are needed to bring
about cheaper and more accessible energy, such as in rural electrification programmes and so on.
Unfortunately, many of these grandiose Hydroelectric Dam projects are begun in haste, without
proper Environmental Impact Studies being carried out prior to construction, or is some cases
the latter are simply ignored by high-handed and arrogant Government Ministers. The result is
a host of problems that might have been avoided or modified. These include widespread flooding
of valleys, the displacement of indigenous peoples, over-growth of water surface vegetation and
algae, silting, increased acidity levels in the water, and a detrimental impact on river life,
usually resulting in the death of fish and other creatures. The large expanses of stagnant water
in the Tropics also acts as a breeding ground for mosquitoes and results in an increase in
outbreaks of malaria and dengue fever. |
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| 8. NARCOTICS PRODUCTION |
Last, but not least, and most often overlooked of the factors in the destruction of the
Rainforest is the International Drug Trade. However, recent findings by NASA, in the late
1980s, based on aerial photography, showed the extensive scale of coca-growing operations in
the highlands of Colombia. In 1988, Enrique Santos, Editor of El Tiempo, Colombia's largest
newspaper, reported that "Cocaine has overtaken Coffee as Colombia's main export". In 1988,
Colombia earned U.S. $1.5 Billion from Coffee exports, but an estimated U.S. $4 Billion from
Cocaine smuggling. In the Huallaga Valley of Peru alone, an estimated 670,000 acres of coca
were under cultivation. Marc Dourojeanni of the World Bank's Latin American Environmental
Division claimed that in after Coffee, Coca was Peru's second largest crop. The result of this
has been the deforestation of some 1.8 million acres of Rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon and
the eastern Andes. In addition, the chemicals used by the Drug dealers to process the cocaine
in jungle labs, are being dumped into rivers and streams, and this toxic waste is affecting
fish, plants and other wildlife. Over 150 rivers and streams in Peru alone are polluted well
beyond standards laid down by the World Health Organization and the toxic poisoning to water
throughout the region continues unabated. The United States, The DEA, and Latin American
Governments have enlisted the aid of defoliants and herbicides in their all-out war against
the Drug Trade. While some Environmentalists have opposed the use of chemicals, there seems to
be no other solution. The widespread cultivation of Opium Poppies in Laos, Cambodia and other
areas of the Far East have also resulted in destrction of the Rainforest and attempts are also
being made by Governments in the area to use chemical agents to destroy the Opium crops. Sadly
it is the Rainforest that always seems to be the loser in these situations. |
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