|
|
|
Even for poor countries, destroying forests rarely makes economic sense
SURVEY: DEVELOPMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Stumped by trees
Mar 19th 1998
From The Economist print edition
Even for poor countries, destroying forests rarely makes economic sense
PARAGOMINAS, a sweltering, mosquito-ridden town in the north of Brazil, is the stuff of an environmentalist's nightmares. The air is bitter with sawdust and smoke. Dozens of sawmills are slicing up prime rainforest tree-trunks, and each is surrounded by dozens of charcoal kilns spewing out black smoke. For hundreds of miles around, the landscape is bare of trees except for the odd stump. No one takes any notice of government regulations that restrict logging, explains a manager at one of the sawmills; and if officials try to enforce them, they can easily be bribed. "Everyone is out for a quick buck here," he says.
Yet Brazilians get annoyed when environmentalists from developed countries start moaning about the destruction of the rainforests. Most of the arguments for preserving the forests, they point out, are something of a rich man's luxury. They are about nebulous worries for the medium-term future, not about a developing country's crying need, here and now, to improve its people's living standards. Besides, satellite pictures show that despite decades of exploitation, over 85% of Brazil's Amazon jungle region is still covered in trees. So why, ask Brazilians, should they not be allowed to put some of their forests to commercial use?
The best answer is that rapid deforestation is rarely in the economic interest of the country concerned. More often it is due to a combination of bad policies, population growth and poverty. In some parts of the world, such as the highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Nepal, and in the countryside surrounding many fast-growing cities in Africa, trees are lost because the poor use wood for fuel. Elsewhere the culprit is war. During Cambodia's long civil war, both the government and the Khmers Rouges financed their military operations partly through logging. Since the 1970s, around half of Cambodia's forests have disappeared. Another reason for forest depletion is the slash-and-burn method of cultivation employed by the poorest farmers. In East Asia, environmentalists think that the recent economic troubles will hurt the forests as poor families lose their city jobs and return to the countryside.
More intensive farming technology can help, by reducing the amount of land that poor families need to reclaim from forests to feed themselves. In parts of the Brazilian Amazon, where smallholders� farming techniques are still very basic, a local environmental group has helped reduce forest loss in one community by getting farmers to adopt a few simple improvements, such as planting their crops in rows rather than scattering seeds, and using hoes for weeding. The biggest potential gains from applying existing farming technology could be achieved in sub-Saharan Africa, where the use of fertiliser, for example, is running at only a quarter the level in India.
Perverse incentives
Commercial logging, too, is a big cause of deforestation. Demand for industrial timber is expected to increase from around 1.6 billion cubic metres a year in 1995 to 1.9 billion cubic metres in 2010, driven by rising standards of living. Developing countries with hot climates have a competitive advantage in this market, simply because trees grow much faster than in temperate climates. But plantation forestry can be as profitable as chopping trees from virgin forest, and has the obvious advantage that growers can choose which species to cultivate. The main reason why virgin forest is being cut down is not so much the simple pursuit of profit but a set of perverse economic incentives.
In the Brazilian Amazon, between the 1960s and the early 1990s the forest shrank largely because the government intended it to. Brazil's military rulers saw the region as a safety valve for the overpopulation, landlessness and poverty in the country's crowded coastal region; they also feared that a thinly inhabited Amazon was an invitation to foreign invaders.
In their attempt to give "the land without people to the people without land", the authorities colonised the region and built roads and schools. Newcomers qualified for ownership of a plot of land simply by clearing the trees on it. But usually the soil of cleared Amazon rainforest proved unsuitable for agriculture: after a few years crops would begin to fail, forcing farmers to deforest yet more land. The government also offered tax breaks to companies spending money on approved development schemes in the region. Firms poured in, many of them setting up giant cattle ranches.
In the early 1990s some of the more obvious incentives to wreak environmental havoc were dismantled. Partly to appease the green lobby abroad, the Brazilian government also passed a series of increasingly tough laws�first prohibiting landowners from logging more than 50% of their land, then lowering the limit to 20%. Yet satellite data released at the beginning of this year show that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in 1995 reached an all-time high of 29,000 square kilometres, an area about the size of Belgium. The figure for 1996 was down, but at 18,100 square kilometres still substantial. Why the continuing destruction?
On the face of it, the problem appears to be that existing rules are simply not enforced. Ibama, Brazil's environment agency, has a small number of officials to police a vast region. Last year it collected just 6% of the fines it levied. The Brazilian government has estimated that 80% of the timber in the region is harvested illegally. But a visit to a town such as Paragominas suggests that effective enforcement would take a lot more than hiring extra inspectors. The atmosphere is that of a frontier region where no one quite knows who owns the land and property disputes are often settled by violence. Everyone milks the forest for what they can get.
Because of confusion over land titles, conflicts often flare between Indians, squatters and loggers. Many owners deliberately do not register their property with the authorities because they fear it might restrict their logging. But they also burn trees as a sign of occcupation to discourage invasions from the country's militant landless.
Insecurity of land tenure explains the continuing popularity of cattle ranching in the region: if someone else takes the land, at least the cattle can be moved on. That same insecurity of tenure also means that plantation forestry, however sensible in theory, does not stand a chance in practice. Landowners would have to wait perhaps 20 years to harvest the trees, during which time squatters or accidental fires could easily wipe out their investment.
Deforestation in Indonesia�which last year caught the world's attention by producing a series of catastrophic smogs�has a similar tangle of causes. As in Brazil, the government had an official programme encouraging millions of people to move from the crowded islands of Java and Bali to less densely populated but heavily forested islands such as Kalimantan, Sumatra and Irian Jaya. And as in Brazil, property rights in the forests are often ill-defined, leading to violent conflicts between locals, migrants and forestry firms. Traditional adat law, which has governed the use of forest lands until the past few decades, clashes with more recent logging concessions handed out by the government in Jakarta, and fire is used as a weapon by both sides. Small farmers sometimes burn trees planted by big forestry companies, and large firms have in turn burnt land to drive out smallholders.
But whereas Brazil has abandoned government policies that explicitly encourage deforestation, Indonesia is further behind. The government levies high export taxes on unprocessed logs to help the domestic wood-processing industry. This has kept domestic timber prices below world levels, providing forestry firms with an implicit subsidy estimated at over $2 billion a year, but also encouraging them to use logs inefficiently. Government concessions to log a particular area have been handed out in what development bankers call "a non-transparent fashion" (ie, to friends of President Suharto's family), and for periods too short to give the firms an incentive to look after the forest. Only now, under pressure from the IMF, has the government promised to reform the timber trade.
In sum, the sort of policies that might help developing countries to reduce their rate of deforestation are also the sort of policies that are likely to promote economic growth: upholding the rule of law, securing property rights, weeding out corruption and reducing subsidies. That may seem obvious, but it challenges an assumption still widely held in rich and poor countries alike: that rapid development and rapid deforestation must go hand in hand.
As long as that belief persists, the pleas of the rich world's environmentalists will be seen as somewhat other-worldly. They want to preserve the forests for two main reasons: because burning them could eventually contribute to world climate change, and because they know that forest loss will reduce biodiversity. Both are worries for the longer term, although recent research suggests that burning trees is now beginning to affect the local climate of the Brazilian rainforest too, making it drier and more liable to accidental fires.
A loss of biodiversity will not start to show up until well into the next century, but it is an issue that gets environmentalists really excited. According to one estimate, tropical rainforests contain around half of all the world's species�far more than the temperate forests of Europe and America. (The Amazon forests also contain about 400 human tribes, which are gradually being squeezed out.) The depletion of rainforests is being blamed for the increasingly rapid rate at which the world is losing species. But scientific understanding of species loss, and its potential dangers, is riddled with uncertainties.
Life's rich pattern
Scientists have little idea how many species exist in the first place. Recent estimates range from 7m to 20m. According to the Global Biodiversity Assessment, a UN-sponsored report in which about 1,000 scientists have had a hand, a good working estimate is between 13m and 14m species. But of that number, says the report, only about 1.75m have been scientifically described.
If scientists have no clear idea how many species exist in the first place, rates of loss are necessarily even harder to divine. Since 1600, over 480 animal species and 650 plant species are recorded as having become extinct. But since the vast majority of all species are unknown, rates of loss of known species are not much of a guide to anything. Besides, species thought to be extinct occasionally pop up from nowhere. So scientists rely on a crude calculation. They have a very rough idea, from a number of detailed studies, how many species are likely to be lost if the size of a particular habitat�a tropical forest, say�is reduced by a certain amount. They then apply this number to the total area of tropical forest lost each year (another very approximate figure, often derived from incomplete satellite data). Using this method, scientists working on the Global Biodiversity Assessment have estimated that, if current rates of forest loss continue over the next 30 years, the number of species in tropical forests will fall by 5-10%.
Losing species, even bugs and spiders, might matter for a number of reasons. Ecosystems containing a broad diversity of species and genes are generally better able to adapt to changing conditions than those with just a handful of species, however abundant. Genetic variation is nature's insurance against all sort of eventualities. It might help cushion, for example, the impact of a sudden change in the world's climate. It also can help reduce the effect of disease. The Irish potato famine was so devastating because in the 19th century only a few varieties of potato were planted in Ireland, and these all happened to be vulnerable to the same disease. At present almost all the world's food crops are based on a mere nine species of plants, but in the future any of thousands of other species might prove invaluable. Today's apparently useless species may contain tomorrow's medicine.
To rich-world inhabitants, the best arguments for preserving the rainforests are spiritual: that the diversity of life is a wonder of nature, whether it has a practical application or not; and that it is good to hold on to some wildernesses in the world. But for developing countries trying to lift themselves out of poverty, such arguments seem utterly irrelevant
previous article
|
next article
Source: The Economist
CONTENT COPYRIGHT The Economist. THIS CONTENT IS INTENDED SOLELY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES.
mongabay.com users agree to the following as a condition for use of this material:
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental issues. This constitutes 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
If you are the copyright owner and would like this content removed from mongabay.com, please contact me.
|
