91av

THE WORLD’S great rainforests as we like to picture them from television
documentaries will soon be gone.

Many people fondly imagine the forests’ vast size and almost sacred
ecological status will buy them enough time for environmentalists to work
miracles. They should take a look at the international plan to “save” the
world’s largest rainforest, the Brazilian Amazon, which was clinched last month
in Brasilia.

After ten years of discussions with Western governments, Brazil agreed to
preserve just 10 per cent of the forest that remains in return for cash from the
World Bank’s Global Environment Facility. At the same time, the Brazilian
Congress was considering plans to loosen legal controls on the development of
other parts of the Amazon.

Already, more than 50 per cent of the world’s tropical forests have gone
(see Graph).
Asia has lost 88 per cent of its natural forest. Throughout the 1990s,
rainforest losses averaged 1 per cent a year. Not only do we have to worry about
losing rare species, a cascade of other environmental consequences frequently
follow the disappearance of forest, including changing climate, the spread of
insect-borne diseases like malaria, soil erosion and flooding.

That’s why the pessimism felt by observers such as Frederic Achard,
coordinator of an European Union survey called Tropical Ecosystem Environment
Observation by Satellite is so alarming. “The pressures to remove the forests
are too great to be stopped in many places,” he says. According to Cambridge
forestry scientist Tim Whitmore: “Southeast Asia has had it. Perhaps parts of
Papua New Guinea can be saved, but not much else.”

A report to be released later this month by the EU and the World Wide Fund
for Nature, after much prevarication, underlines the huge difficulties facing
campaigners and governments in their bid to halt the eradication of virgin
tropical forest. It claims that countries have been forced to chop down their
forests to raise cash to pay off international debts. The same report also names
11 countries (six in Central Africa) where foreign companies have bribed their
way to lucrative logging concessions. The authors recommend banning all logging
until the corruption had been rooted out.

And while crooked bureaucrats get rich, the destruction continues. This week
the World Bank is likely to join a $3 billion oil industry project to
drive a pipeline for a thousand kilometres through the virgin forests of
Cameroon to tap a huge oilfield in landlocked southern Chad. The Bank says the
project could transform the economies of both countries. Critics say it will
bring loggers and miners and bushmeat traders and a mess of squalor masquerading
as economic development to a region occupied by indigenous hunters.

But there is another way of looking at the situation—the view of
rainforest realists or pragmatic protectionists. They say a detailed examination
of how and why forests fall could, if nothing else, mitigate the damage to the
global environment.

The two biggest causes of forest destruction are logging and clearing land
for farming. The combination of both gave Cameroon the fastest deforestation
rate in Africa in the late 1990s.

Other factors come into play. Civil wars in West Africa and the collapse of
urban economies in Asia have triggered invasions of the rainforest in recent
years. Even politically stable developing countries point out that most rich
nations started out on the path to prosperity by plundering natural resources.
Why should they be denied the same kick-start when they are so poor?

Some environmental economists even say that some forms of development could
be a boon to rainforest conservation precisely because they stand to replace
logging as a source of income. Their list includes mining, oil drilling and some
heavy industry. “If countries generate income from these activities, which don’t
use much land, then they don’t need to grow their own food. They can import
instead,” says William Sunderlin of the Center for International Forestry
Research in Bogor, Indonesia. Equally, oil exports in particular bump up the
value of local currencies so much that timber exports, for instance, become
uneconomic.

Sunderlin sees strong evidence of this in a comparison of two Central African
countries. “In Cameroon, they chop down forests to make money from timber sales
and to clear land for farming. In neighbouring Gabon, where their exports are
dominated by oil, there is much less deforestation.”

Some 85 per cent of Gabon is still rainforest, one of the highest percentages
in the world. Belying its poor environmental reputation in Ogoniland in nearby
Nigeria, oil company Shell is running an environmentally friendly oil extraction
business in the forest, advised by the WWF. Poor farmers move to jobs on oil
rigs or in the cities rather than chopping down the rainforests.

Equally some scientists argue that we should not be obsessed about protecting
virgin forests. Many farmers are growing their own trees—including some
indigenous varieties on land that was once virgin forest, in order to harvest
wood, bark and fruit. Several studies suggest that because of this, tree cover
may actually be growing in tropical regions as varied as West Africa and
Pakistan. Recently, Qureish Noordin of the Kenyan Forestry Research Institute
took me to the highlands of Western Kenya, where population density sometimes
exceeds a thousand people per square kilometre, but still tree cover is
growing.

“As farms become smaller, farmers want to grow more trees because they are
more profitable than crops like maize,” he said. In his nursery at Maseno he
showed me dozens of tree species grown by local farmers for fruit and medicinal
products like bark. “People used to go into the forests to get them, but now
they grow them on their farms,” he said.

But many green campaigners are abandoning hopes of a synergy between
environment and development. While some forests pay their way through an upsurge
in eco-tourism, elsewhere the destruction continues. The much vaunted
“extractive reserves” of the Brazilian Amazon, where communities would gather
fruit and nuts without destroying the forests, have failed to catch on.

In some quarters there has even been an upsurge of interest in old-style
conservation—buying up pristine rainforest to preserve it. The Nature
Conservancy, based in Arlington, Virginia, has a billion-dollar war chest for
worldwide wilderness purchases. But most observers feel that on the whole, the
economic pressure on the developing world to exploit rainforests is
irresistible.

The position taken by Western governments and corporations can be
contradictory. In South America, Guyana has dedicated a large tract of
rainforest at Iwokrama to a science-based study of conservation, but last month
agreed to hand over 400 square kilometres of swamp forest for a US-run rocket
launch pad (91av, 3 June, p 5). Similarly, the EU is funding
rainforest conservation in Cameroon. But at the same time it’s paying for the
construction and rehabilitation of some 2000 kilometres of roads within the
country that are bound to make it easier to invade the forests.

David Brown of the Overseas Development Institute, London, is critical of the
pressure being applied to developing countries by WWF and others, which is
seeing them set aside preserved areas that they were not able to protect. He
believes that governments will make more progress in conservation if they stop
trying to centralise control of forests and instead give effective property
rights to the people who live in them. Only then will forest dwellers have an
incentive to protect the forests from over-exploitation.

The best that can be hoped is that forests will prove of real value to their
residents or provide them with important economic or ecological services, such
as flood protection, so they can be saved from short-term plundering. But the
truth seems inescapable: The vast majority of virgin tropical rainforest is
doomed.

The WWF’s African forest coordinator, Wale Adeleke, admits that in the
future, conserved areas will probably not exceed 10 per cent of what we have
now. “Indeed it is not rational to require Africa to protect larger areas than
the developed countries are prepared to set aside themselves,” he says. This all
leaves formal conservation strategies, which hinge on national parks and
reserves, looking as substantial as the pristine, emerald preserves we like to
think they’ll maintain.