Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
society that caused the problem has no recourse.
In Sri Lanka and in Central America, there are
ancient cities reclaimed by forest.
(Dudley
et al
. 1995). Ecological certification is one
strategy. It assumes that consumers will pay a
premium for wood from sustainable forest
operations. A survey of timber merchants actively
involved in US markets for certified wood
products, indicates a growing market (Merry and
Carter 1997). However, there is little evidence of
a green premium being applied to final products,
and the main change is that new entrants to the
market are purchasing from domestic, not
international sources.
The problem is not restricted to timber.
Colleague Norman Myers memorably found
himself sued by that most litiginous of
international hamburger chains on account of a
misplaced comment in his exposure of the
'hamburger connection', which links tropical
deforestation to the demands of Western
consumers for cheap meat. Recently, Nicholson
et
al
. (1995) analysed the argument that extensive
cattle production causes deforestation in Central
America. They assessed the idea that the problem
could be reduced by the use of more intensive
cattle production methods. However,
intensification was found unlikely to affect
deforestation rates, because consumer demand for
livestock products was not the driving factor. They
argue that there is a need to find systems of
intensification that respect the logic of existing
extensive cattle systems and that balance trade-offs
between objectives of producers and policy
makers.
Active forest suppression
This, at least, demonstrates that forests are resilient
systems. Given time, forests regenerate and reclaim
their land, even if they are not actively replanted.
In many cases, deforested land has to be kept
deforested by the regular suppression of
regeneration, often through grazing and burning.
An outer zone of fire-resistant species characterises
many forest islands in Africa's savannah regions.
The last patch of native prairie in northern Illinois
is preserved because local environmentalists, in
defiance of Chicago city ordinances, ensure that
the site is burned regularly. The uplands of Wales
and much else in Europe are kept deforested by
overgrazing sheep. Even in Amazonia, clearance is
not a one-way process: for every 3 hectares cleared,
perhaps one is reclaimed by forest regeneration
(Skole andTucker 1993).
Western capitalism
Murali and Hegde (1987) are among those who
point out that much tropical deforestation is
deforestation exported from the developed world.
Unwilling to consume their own forest resources,
developed nations are happy to use their corporate
muscle and economic wealth to plunder the
resources of their poorer neighbours in the
developing world. The World Resources Institute
suggests that, of the 15.4 million ha of tropical
forest lost each year to deforestation, 5.9 million
ha (38 per cent) is due to logging, and of this 4.9
million ha (83 per cent) comes from the timber
mining of primary forest reserves (World
Resources Institute 1994). The situation is a far
cry from the ambition of the International Timber
Trade Organisation's resolution to have all timber
extraction derived from sustainable, that is
replanted, sources by the year 2000. Meanwhile,
environmental organisations throughout the
Developed World conduct a largely futile
campaign to restrict the import of tropical timbers
Many different factors
In most cases, deforestation is the result of a
combination of factors (
cf
. Brown and Pearce
1994). Brothers (1997) presents a useful case study
from the microcosm of a single village in
Dominica. Here, rapid deforestation was associated
with the construction of access roads, agricultural
colonisation and pasture conversion. Logging also
played an important role in opening up the forest
to agricultural settlement. Pasture conversion was
not due to the expansion of large ranches by
wealthy landowners but a local response to the
economic advantages of cattle raising. As always,
