Plantation Agriculture as a Driver of Deforestation and Degradation of Central African Coastal Estuarine Forest Landscape of South-Western Cameroon - The Land/Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone of West and Central Africa - page 169

Table 1 Accuracy assessment classification
Class name

Reference totals Classified totals Number

correct

Producers
accuracy (%)

Conditional kappa for
each category (K^)

Unclassified 1 1 1 - 0.8407

Forest 6 7 6 100.00 0.7852

Mixed secondary 4 5 4 100.00 1.000

Water 4 4 4 100.00 0.6588

Others 0 0 0 - 1.000

Farm and plantation 7 4 4 57.14 1.000

Plantation 6 5 5 83.33 1.000

Lava 2 2 2 100.00 1.000

Settlements 13 11 11 84.62 1.000

Cloud 2 2 2 100.00 1.000

Mangrove 3 4 3 100.00 0.7364

Totals 58 58 52

Overall classification accuracy = 89.66 %

Overall kappa statistics = 0.8834

Table 2 Surface area occupied by various land uses in the study area
Landuse (ha) 1986 2000 2011

Dense forest 43,280.9 14,032 24,564

Mixed secondary forest 16,253 25,916 23,515

Plantation 67,792 51,295 68,340

Farmland and plantation 4,149 34,453 23,515

Mangrove 21,557 16,286 17,855

Settlements 11,022 11,312 13,512

Lava 835 667 278

Cloud 20,608 40,270 23,238

demand of banana and other plantation produces in the
Western world. This has caused many national and inter-
national companies to be increasingly involved in this
activity. Also, various assistance schemes such as the sup-
ply of free seedlings and financial assistance to individuals
and community-based organizations such as the common
initiative groups through the South West Development
Authority (SOWEDA) have made the process of starting a
plantation fairly easy.
The role of plantation agriculture in modifying the nat-
ural forest cover has been documented by other researchers.
Hartemink et al. ( 2008 ) attributed the high rate of forest
conversion to intensive agricultural plantations in the trop-
ical regions as largely due to the increasing population in
the region. Serneels ( 2001 ) discovered that changes in the
land cover of the Kenyan Embu Highlands were due to the

introduction of commercial plantations in the area which
resulted to a decrease in the natural vegetation cover.
The struggle to satisfy the basic human livelihood
demands is generally accepted as the main trigger behind
forest conversion in tropical areas (CIDA 2001 ). The rate of
current deforestation is alarming and remains a critical issue
regarding its implication for the global carbon cycle and
biodiversity. The annual deforestation rate in the area due to
plantation agriculture is 1.3 % which is greater than the FAO
( 1995 ) annual deforestation rate of 0.6 % in Cameroon.
Several studies carried out around the world also
revealed the negative impacts of plantation agriculture on
biodiversity loss. Koh and Wilcove ( 2008 ) looking at the
impact of oil palm agriculture on tropical biodiversity in
Malaysia and Indonesia acknowledged that oil palm plan-
tations in Malaysia and Indonesia have replaced forests and,