0.12 Natural capital & Sustainable development introduction  (Page 5/12)

Slash-and-burn agriculture is only one manifestation of the effects of poverty on deforestation. In many poor nations, the role of poverty in deforestation has been magnified by the ever-more-desperate search for fuel wood by impoverished people. In Ghana in the eighties, for example, for every tree harvested for lumber, nine trees were cut down for firewood. Deforestation accelerated soil erosion, groundwater depletion, and loss of agricultural productivity. For developing nations generally, 80% of trees cut down in the nineties were for fuel or other domestic use, not for export as logs or wood products.

We will see in subsequent chapters that government failure has often been a key factor in causing poverty itself – misguided tax policy, inappropriate monetary policy, restrictive trade policy, egregiously bad exchange rate policy and misdirected agricultural policy: In my experience, I would say that much more often than not, poverty in poor countries has been driven as much by bad policy as anything else. This was surely try for Ghana 1970-85, Haiti 1940-2008, Zimbabwe 1995-2013, North Korea 1946-2013, Nigeria since1975, Argentina 1945-2000 and Argentina 2011-2014.

Consider Ghana in the 20 ^th century. There, poverty by itself, or in combination with other factors such as rent-seeking, has been the main cause of tropical deforestation.

In 1900, one-third of Ghana’s land area was covered by natural tropical forest. In 1967-71, the forest still covered about 20% of the land; there was still a lot of forest to study. No more. By 1995, forest cover had shrunk to less than 5%.

Elsewhere in West Africa, Southeast Asia, Brazil, and Central America, poverty has also been killing the forest. Poor, landless Ghanaians, Ivoirian etc. have not been the cause of deforestation, but the instruments of forest destruction. There are not the traditional shifting cultivators of Africa or Asia who for centuries past have moved from parcel to parcel. Rather, I refer to the landless, mostly urban people who have become “shifted cultivators,” driven to degrade the forest by hunger and population pressures.

Most of the plant and animal species on earth occur in the tropical forest. The tropical forest once covered 12% of the earth’s land surface before extensive deforestation began after 1945. Now it covers less than 6%. Worldwide, the tropical forest estate shrank by about 142,000 square km. per year in the nineties. Of that amount, almost 60% fell to slash-and-burn agriculture. Another 7% or 10,000 square km per year were deforested by poor people searching for fuel wood. Forest clearing for cattle ranching, mostly in Brazil and Central America, took another15,000 square km. per year.

It is important to note that the role of poverty-fueled shifting cultivation in deforestation has been increasing , while the relative roles of logging and cattle ranching have been declining . Nearly 1.4 billion people in the world live in absolute poverty. A third of these are landless poor engaged in destructive forms of shifting cultivation. Their number is growing, so we should expect growing damages from shifting cultivation.