Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and Gray (1996) model the relationship between
new roads, land use, and deforestation in southern
Belize, an area experiencing rapid expansion of
both subsistence and commercial agriculture. They
suggest that road building in areas with
agriculturally poor soils and low population
densities may be a 'lose-lose' proposition, causing
habitat fragmentation and providing low
economic returns. However, as the frontier moves,
so deforestation accelerates with the expansion of
infrastructure, trade, debt and investment in
people, and resource-based economic expansion.
Rudel and Roper (1997) continue to suggest
that frontier theory best describes deforestation in
large forest zones and immiserisation theory that
in areas with small fragmented forests. Curiously,
they ignore the third major set of explanations,
which blame deforestation on global capitalism
acting through the agencies of (multinational)
corporations, abetted by ineffective and/or
corrupt national administrations.
change, the conversion benefits the country
because it increases the area's commercial
integration with urban markets. Consequently,
public institutions tend to support deforestation
for pasture through credit and tenure incentives
and the toleration of poor forest administration
(Wunder 1996). In sum, from the viewpoint of a
national government, the main economic benefits
to be derived from tropical forests are gained by
exploiting their reserves of timber and the
reservoir of undeveloped agricultural soil that lies
beneath them.
Shifting cultivation
Governments and other outsiders benefit from the
destruction of tropical forests. However, it is often
the forest people who get the blame (Myers
1994:28). Traditionally, the main agricultural
system, and main sustainable economic activity of
most forest peoples, is 'shifting cultivation'
(Dembner 1996). Today, 'shifting cultivators' are
counted responsible for up to 50 per cent of
tropical deforestation (Angelsen 1995). In fact,
'shifting cultivation' and 'slash-and-burn' are, like
'deforestation', pejorative terms. In this case, they
are used to misrepresent a sophisticated and self-
sustainable system of agriculture. The reality is that
traditional agriculturists have managed forest lands
for millennia through the application of an
organic, energy-efficient, low-input/high-output,
long-rotation forest fallow, agricultural farming
system.
However, it is true that many of these systems
face increasing pressures, often due to immigration
and commercial forest exploitation. Under these
conditions, indigenous systems of shifting
cultivation cause forest degradation, though rarely
full deforestation. Shifting cultivation does not
involve sudden or dramatic clearances. It works a
forest in patches and achieves deforestation by
slow, progressive forest change (Saxena and
Nautiyal 1997). What happens is that as pressure
on the land increases, the length of the cultivation
cycle decreases and the forests that are cut become
younger and younger. In parts of the Golden
Triangle of Southeast Asia and in Meghalaya, India,
Government
In fact, it may be facile to blame national
governments for failing to preserve tropical forests.
Simply preserving these forests may not be in their
best local interests. According to a World Bank
analysis, the within-country economic benefits of
protecting tropical forests are often small enough
for most governments to ignore (Chomitz and
Kumari 1996). Certainly, any economic benefit to
be gained from preserving tropical rain forest is
highly sensitive to local circumstance and, when
the alternative use is agroforestry or plantation
crops, the preservation of natural forests may yield
no direct domestic benefit. Second, the
hydrological benefits of forest preservation versus
deforestation are poorly understood and highly
variable (Bruijnzeel 1990). Third, estimates of
forest value based on non-wood forest products
are often faulty and, where domesticated or
synthetic substitutes exist (e.g. rubber and kapok),
the benefits from non-wood forest products from
natural forests tend to zero. Thus, in Ecuador's
highlands, where the conversion of forests into
pastures is the dominant long-term land-use
