Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
deforestation rate, giving the area's forests a ten-
year half-life caused by cutting for charcoal.
Further, nearly 90 per cent of the charcoal
consumption was local and domestic. In Rwanda,
even before the war, there was a fuelwood deficit
of around 3×10
6
m
3
yr
-1
. Subsequently, more than
50,000 ha of forests and plantations have been
destroyed. Similar problems have emerged in the
former Socialist countries, where economic
decline and hardship have forced people to steal
trees to provide winter fuel.
By contrast, in Ecuador, fuelwood is a
temporary resource, used only in the earliest
phases of agricultural frontier expansion (Wunder
1996). Deforestation in highland Ecuador is
dominated by agricultural colonisation and cattle
ranching, and only rarely is fuel-wood a
motivation.
across a prosperous melon farm on the fertile
plains. Owned by a foreign company, this highly
capitalised agribusiness produces cash crops for
export, earns foreign exchange for the
government and provides seasonal cash income for
local pickers and packers. It is also why local
farmers cultivate steep slopes. However,
agricultural extension often involves steep
marginal lands. In India, forests in Uttarakhand's
Pranmati Gadh declined from 75 to 65 per cent,
while the cultivated area increased from 12.5 to
18.5 per cent. Most of the new arable land was
located on slopes of 20-35° (Haigh
et al
. 1998).
Thus the most important direct reason for
deforestation is the permanent conversion of
forests to agricultural land (Bulte and van Soest
1996). Of Kerala's 256,000 ha of forest cleared
between 1964 and 1984, 60 per cent has been
converted to agriculture, while most of the
remainder has gone for irrigation and hydro-
electric works (Haigh
et al
. 1998). In Venezuela,
deforestation is primarily due to the expansion of
agriculture; just 20 per cent is related to timber
extraction (Centeno 1996).
These figures reinforce the popular image of
deforestation created by media images of forest
burning and clear felling for the creation of arable
or grazing land. So too does the case history of
deforestation in the Madagascar highlands. This
begins around AD 600, when Indonesian settlers
moved into the land and began to degrade the
forest through long rotation forest fallow
agriculture. After AD 1000, the introduction of
zebu cattle from Africa encouraged farmers to
expand their pastures by burning. By AD 1600,
aided by poor regeneration, most of the forest had
gone. The consequences included massive erosion,
floods, drought, faunal extinction and economic
collapse as the land degenerated to impoverished
grassland (Gade 1996). Similar illustrations litter
the world. In the West, it has been possible to
reverse such catastrophes through concerted
investment in reforestation, soil conservation and
hydrological regulation, as in the Yazoo High-
lands of Mississippi (Duffy and Ursic 1991). In the
developing world, and through history, when land
conversion goes too far or goes wrong, the human
Agricultural extension
Certainly, deforestation is driven by land scarcity
and by resource-poor migrants. In Latin America,
many people are being driven from their homes
by the expansion of the modern economy and
forced to find land on the forest margin.
Nicholson
et al
. (1995) argue that the root causes
are poor economic opportunities among the rural
poor and their inability to manage new lands
sustainably. Nygren's (1995) study of Costa Rica's
Central Valley argues that the 'frontier' farmers,
unlike their traditional forest-farming
counterparts, do not conceive the forest as a
renewable resource and do not believe that forest
management is a worthwhile activity within the
context of peasant agriculture (
cf
. Bunch 1984).
Changing such perceptions provides a major
objective for development in this region.
One cause of deforestation is the replacement
of peasant farming systems with agribusiness, a
process that has forced displaced peasants to clear
forests on steep marginal lands (Bunch 1984). At
my colleague Jon Hellin's steep-slope research-site
in southern Honduras, we try to evaluate the
benefits of soil conservation technologies, working
with resource-poor local farmers to grow maize
(Hellin and Larrea 1997). The test plot looks down
