I am trying to save the knowledge that the forests and this planet are alive, to give it back to you who have lost the understanding.
--Chief Paulinho Paiakan of the Kayapo
Rainforests are being destroyed by mainly three things: cattle ranching, commercial logging, and the farming practices of people living in rainforests.
Of course, most ranchers, loggers, and farmers are environmentally sensitive, and our society needs the food and materials which they provide. But, when loggers relentlessly over-harvest rainforests and farmers and ranchers over-work and over-graze cleared rainforest lands, the environment is damaged because resources are consumed and not replaced.
This consumption of resources without replacement is said to be a "non-sustainable use of resources." Specifically, it is non-sustainable ranching, logging, and farming that destroys rainforests.
Cattle Ranching
Clearing rainforests to create new pastures for cattle destroys approximately 5,700 square miles of rainforest each year. This comprises about 11 percent of all rainforests destroyed annually.
In some parts of the world, cattle ranching is the primary cause of deforestation. This is the case in Central America and some parts of South America. In Latin America, over the last twenty years, more than 78,000 square miles of rainforest were converted to cattle pasture, an area about the size of Nebraska.
Soil Quality
Rainforest soils are typically thin, poor, and inadequate for cattle ranching. Most nutrients are stored in the forest's vegetation. When this vegetation is removed, the soil has little regenerative power and cannot grow enough grass to sustain cattle for long.
Cleared rainforest lands do grow ample grass initially, however. This is because most ranchers clear rainforest by burning, which enriches the soil with ash. Nevertheless, soil fertility declines with each passing year.
Most ranchers of rainforests are aware of the region's poor soil quality. These ranchers, however, are content to graze cleared rainforest lands for a few years and then to abandon these pastures and clear new ones.
For this reason, ranching in rainforests has become a perpetual cause of deforestation and is considered non-sustainable. In Amazonia, one-third of the rainforest land cleared for cattle today lies abandoned.
Governmental Incentives
Because of poor soil quality and the expense of acquiring and clearing new lands, many rainforest cattle operations are economic failures. In countries like Brazil, however, governmental incentives help rainforest cattle ranchers earn profits. These incentives include subsidies and tax breaks; some tropical governments even give away rainforest lands to those who will clear and ranch it.
Governments outside the tropics also encourage cattle ranching in rainforests. They do this by sanctioning international loans that develop the industry. In the 1970s the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank made over $4 billion in loans and grants to support cattle ranching in rainforests.
Because of governmental incentives, beef industries in tropical countries are booming. In the last 25 years, beef production has tripled in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.
Ironically, these same Central American countries now consume less beef than they did a quarter century ago; their citizens cannot afford the prices that developed countries are willing to pay. In the last 25 years, most of the beef produced in Central America was exported to the United States.
Logging
Another principal cause of tropical deforestation is commercial logging. Each year, this industry destroys about 11,400 square miles of rainforest--about 21 percent of the total.
Commercial logging is primarily a problem in Southeast Asia. About 70 percent of all wood exported from the tropics comes from this region; the world's largest exporter is Indonesia.
The leading importer of tropical wood is Japan. This small island nation imports about half the wood harvested from the tropics.
The result of Japan's appetite for wood can be seen in the landscapes of its principal trading partners, which were at one time almost completely covered with forests. These partners include the Philippines, which is now 80 percent deforested; Thailand (85 percent deforested); Malaysia (50 percent deforested); and more recently Indonesia (30 percent deforested).
The Low Cost of Tropical Wood
Tropical woods, long prized for their strength and beauty, are today inexpensive to harvest.
This is because most tropical countries are underdeveloped. Compared to the costs of land and labor in industrialized countries, it costs little to clear-cut timber in tropical rainforests. Moreover, many tropical countries impose few environmental constraints on logging companies.
To governments of tropical countries, the export of wood is an $8 billion industry. Products include logs, lumber, plywood, and wood pulp. End products include many disposable items, such as paper, packaging materials, paper cups, and paper plates. In Japan tropical wood is even used to make disposable chopsticks.
Local Government Policies
Many tropical governments encourage commercial logging of their rainforests. Some Brazilian lumber companies have operated tax-free for as long as 15 years. Other Brazilian lumber companies have received business loans at very favorable interest rates.
In Malaysia the government has consistently under-valued its currency to make labor and materials less expensive to foreign firms that export wood.
The most destructive governmental policy fostering deforestation, however, is the practice of granting short-term logging leases. A company with a short-term logging lease simply harvests all it can before the lease expires and has little incentive to plant trees for future harvests.
Host countries generally make these short-term leases because the revenues they get are based on the amount of wood harvested. These countries want large, quick harvests.
When Will Non-Sustainable Logging End?
These logging practices are, of course, non-sustainable and destructive to the industry in the long run. Many countries, which today are the leading producers of tropical timber, will soon exhaust their supplies.
Largely stripped of their forests, Thailand and the Philippines already import wood. So does Laos. China and Malaysia should be logged out within the next few years. In fact, the World Bank estimates that only 10 of the 33 countries currently exporting tropical wood will have wood to export beyond the year 2000.
Small-Scale Farming
The main cause of rainforest destruction is the conversion of rainforests to small-scale farms. These small-scale farms are usually started by individuals, families or extended families to grow their own food.
Small-scale farming accounts for about 61 percent of all rainforest destruction--almost 33,000 square miles annually. This equates to an area slightly larger than the entire state of South Carolina that is destroyed each year by small-scale farmers.
Slash and Burn
Most small-scale farmers who clear rainforests do so by cutting down trees and burning vegetation, a method called "slash and burn." These farmers typically move their farms to new areas in the rainforest every few years because the region's heavy rains erode cleared fields and wash nutrients from the soil. This process of clearing, farming, and moving on is called shifting cultivation. Done properly, shifting cultivation does not irreversibly damage rainforests. Indians in the rainforest sustainably farmed in this way for centuries.
These Indians, however, were few in number, and they typically abandoned their farms after a single season before their fields became eroded. As a result, rainforest vegetation was able to regenerate. It is speculated that the entire Amazon jungle at one time or another was farmed by Indians.
In the mid-1960s, however, a new type of farmer began to cultivate the rainforest. These new farmers were immigrants from other parts of their countries and had no experience farming rainforests. Generally, they tried to create permanent farms, which, after a number of years, became eroded, unable to grow vegetation, and had to be abandoned.
Today, farmers are immigrating into rainforests and attempting to create permanent farms in record numbers.
Government-sponsored Immigration
Most of these immigrant farmers have no choice but to move into sparsely populated rainforests. Over-populated cities and poverty have left them no other means to support themselves.
Governments even encourage these migrations. They do this by building roads into rainforests, subsidizing businesses there, and making land grants to people willing to settle these frontier areas--not unlike the land grants that settled the western United States in the 19th century.
Transportation Infrastructure
Many tropical governments build roads into rainforests to help migrant farmers and workers immigrate into otherwise impenetrable jungles. As road networks in the rainforest expand, deforestation increases.
Among the larger highways credited with causing widespread deforestation are the 1,400-mile Transamazon Highway in northern Brazil and the 1,000-mile highway BR 364 from southern Brazil into the Amazon.
In Peru, the Carretera Marginal highway has opened up an estimated 12.5 million acres of rainforest to farming. In Africa, the 600-mile Transgabonnais railway is being built to help logging and mining companies bring workers in and move rainforest products out. Currently under consideration is the completion of the Pan American highway through the Darien rainforest near the southern border of Panama.
Free Land
Some government policies allow settlers to obtain land in the rainforest at virtually no cost. In the 1980s, under the Polonoroeste Regional Development Program in Brazil, settlers paid only a small title fee for land in the rainforest. These settlers could then recoup this fee and their moving expenses by selling timber from their new homesteads.
In some underdeveloped countries, title to remote land in the rainforest can be established only after the land is put into productive use. In such a case, the more land a settler clears, the larger his land grant.
Low Interest Loans
Government policies also foster deforestation by subsidizing businesses in the rainforest. This is the case in Brazil where settlers with title to land are eligible for low-interest government loans.
The Brazilian Central Bank's National Rural Credit System makes over 100 different types of loans to rainforest settlers, most to support livestock and agricultural operations.
Among these loans are lines of credit for buying animals and equipment, creating pastures and irrigation systems, acquiring fertilizer and pesticides, and the like. This government agency also guarantees a minimum price for certain crops grown in the rainforest.
In one of Brazil's rainforest colonization projects (the Gi-Parana project) settlers were surveyed about how they spent their loans--nearly one-fourth used these loans, in part, to buy chainsaws.
A Process of Deforestation
Often, small-scale farming, cattle ranching, and logging only partially destroy rainforests. In some instances, these partially damaged rainforests can regenerate if left fallow for a number of years. However, where these three activities happen in succession, the cumulative effect is devastating to the environment--and irreversible.
The process generally starts with loggers, who cut roads into virgin forests and harvest the biggest and best trees. Then, with easy access along these new roads, small-scale farmers (squatters) slash and burn the remaining forest and establish temporary farms. After a few years, as crop yields decline, cattle operations take over the farms and graze the remaining life from the soil. Left behind are barren, eroding landscapes drained of nutrients and incapable of regenerating vegetation.
Throughout this process there is no incentive to replenish the region's resources. As rainforests are logged out and soils lose their productivity, the loggers, farmers, and ranchers all move deeper into the forest in search of virgin land.
Under current conditions, a sustainable use of rainforests is impossible. As long as government policies encourage farming, ranching, and logging without replanting, deforestation will continue. As long as tropical governments refuse to face overpopulation and poverty problems and instead encourage migration into jungle frontiers, rainforest destruction will not stop.
