About this site
Providing tropical forest news, statistics, photos, and information, rainforests.mongabay.com is the world's most popular rainforest site. [more]
Weekly Newsletter
Mongabay will never distribute your email address or send spam.
Share
Aerial view of rainforest cleared for agriculture. (Photo by R. Butler)
SUBSISTENCE ACTIVITIES
Almost half of tropical deforestation is caused by subsistence activities on a local level by people who simply use the rainforest's resources for their survival. Having neither the money nor the political power to acquire holdings on productive lands, these transient settlers follow and settle along roads constructed in the rainforest by development or extractive firms. After cutting trees for building material, these people use the slash-and-burn technique to clear the surrounding forest for short-term agriculture. First, understory shrubbery is cleared and then forest trees not used as construction material. The area is left to dry for a few months and is then burned. The land is planted with crops like bananas, palms, manioc, maize, or rice. After a year or two, the productivity of the soil declines, and the transient farmers press a little deeper and clear additional forest for more short-term agricultural land. The old, now infertile fields are left for waste or sometimes used for small-scale cattle grazing.
Rondônia, Brazil. Top: June 1985, Bottom: August 1992
These photographs, showing the destruction of tropical rain forests, provide a visual indication of the rate of deforestation that is taking place in the state of Rondônia, which has been especially hard hit by deforestation. The amount of clear-cut area now exceeds the area of remaining rainforest timber stands. The solid dark green areas show the remaining tropical rainforest canopy. Two urban areas separated by a small river can be seen near the center of the photograph.
Photos and text are courtesy of the Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that 10 million hectares of tropical forest are temporarily cleared every year for shifting agriculture. For comparison, FAO says that about 10.4 million hectares of tropical forest were permanently deforested each year between 2000 and 2005.
Although this sort of slash-and-burn agriculture has been used for centuries by indigenous peoples, the practice has been carried out in a careful, small-scale, rotational manner, which ensures relative sustainability. In the past the clearing was left idle for 20 to 100 years, so the forest could recover and again provide fertile land and useful timber. The situation is different today. So many people are practicing slash-and-burn agriculture in a non-rotational manner that fields do not have time to return to secondary forest as they do after natural disturbances. The clearing cycles are becoming shorter and shorter, and in some cases it is only 5-8 years before the forest scrub is again cleared. Eventually, the rainforest ecosystem fails and is replaced by tough grasses which can tolerate the short cycles.
The colonizer not only brings his fire to the rainforest, but also his domestic animals and diseases. Domestic animals decimate local wildlife by infecting them with disease and eating their young, while local indigenous peoples, where they exist, can be infected by the colonists' diseases. When not actively burning forest for agricultural clearing, the colonizer cuts fuel wood and hunts wildlife for food.
It is not solely the fault of the landless peasants for their plight; the unequal distribution of land and inability of the government to provide sufficient legal mechanisms for them to gain title to land are also to blame. These people have few options, and without a better alternative they will continue to do what they must to survive: destroy the forest. This subsistence activity on a local level is the greatest threat to the future of the rainforest and the most difficult to address, especially in regions with fast-growing populations.
In some countries -- though less so today than during the 1970s and 1980s -- the colonization of rainforest land is encouraged by developing governments who would rather have people living on their own land, creating GDP, than in the slums of the crowded cities, consuming GDP. Many governments lack the resources and foresight necessary for proper urban planning and employment. Thus laws are passed by legislatures that promote the clearing of primary forest by allowing free ownership of such lands. In Peru and other countries, for unoccupied or unused land that has been settled or cultivated for a specified amount of time, the land rights revert to the settler regardless of the previous owner (in some cases even if it was a reserve or national park).
The governments of other countries like Brazil and Ecuador encourage settlement of the Amazon Basin by opening roads and offering tax incentives to settlers. Indonesia has a huge resettlement program in the outer islands of the country (Papua, Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Sumatra) to alleviate some of the population pressures of the central islands, develop new regions for economic growth, and to establish regional hegemony over local populations that may harbor ambitions for political autonomy.
Review questions:
What is slash-and-burn agriculture?
Why do colonists and poor farmers destroy the rainforest?
The Caribbean's wonderfully weird (and threatened) mammals, an interview with Jose Nunez-Mino
(01/18/2010) Not many people know the solenodon and the hutia, yet for the fortunate few that have encountered them, these strange little-studied mammals—just barely holding on in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola—deserve to be stars of the animal kingdom. "I could not quite believe it the first time I held a solenodon; I was in utter awe of this mesmerizing mammal. […] They have a long flexible snout which is all down to the fact that it is joined to the skull by a unique ball-and-socket joint. This makes it look as if the snout is almost independent to the rest of the animal. You can’t help but feel fascinated by the snout and inevitably it does make you smile," Dr. Jose Nunez-Mino, the Project Manager for a new initiative to study and conserve the island's last mammals, told mongabay.com in an interview.
Unilever suspends palm oil contract after supplier found to be destroying rainforests
(12/12/2009) The world's largest user of palm oil, Unilever, has suspended its $32.6 million contract with the Indonesian group Sinar Mas after an independent audit proved that Sinar Mas is involved in the destruction of rainforest, reports Reuters. The audit was conducted early this year after a report by Greenpeace alleged that Sinar Mas was engaged in deforestation and the draining of peatlands, both of which release significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Deforestation across Indonesia and Malaysia, in part for oil palm plantations, has also added pressure on many many endangered species, including orangutans, tigers, elephants, and rhinos.
REDD may miss up to 80 percent of land use change emissions
(12/11/2009) The political definition of 'forest' used in REDD (Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) threatens to undermine the program's objective to conserve ecosystems for their ability to sequester carbon, according to a new analysis by the Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB) Partnership for Tropical Forest Margins. In an analysis of three Indonesian provinces using REDD proposals for carbon accounting, ASB found that REDD may miss up to 80 percent of the actual emissions due to land use change. The carbon accounting problems could be fixed, according to ASB, by expanding REDD's purpose from reducing emissions linked to deforestation (considering the problematic definition of forests) to reducing emission from all land use changes that either release or capture greenhouse gases, including but not limited to forests.
Transmitters implanted in orangutans for tracking after release into the wild
(11/23/2009) For the first time transmitters have been implanted in orangutans to track their daily movements. The Sabah Wildlife Department (SWD) has implanted transmitters into three orangutans that have been released back into the wild from Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo.
Deforestation emissions should be shared between producer and consumer, argues study
(11/19/2009) Under the Kyoto Protocol the nation that produces carbon emission takes responsibility for them, but what about when the country is producing carbon-intensive goods for consumer demand beyond its borders? For example while China is now the world's highest carbon emitter, 50 percent of its growth over the last year was due to producing goods for wealthy countries like the EU and the United States which have, in a sense, outsourced their manufacturing emissions to China. A new study in Environmental Research Letters presents a possible model for making certain that both producer and consumer share responsibility for emissions in an area so far neglected by studies of this kind: deforestation and land-use change.
