/* Written 3:51 PM Jul 20, 1995 by foodfirst in igc:dev.foodfirst */
/* ---------- "Rethinking Rainforests & Soc Justic" ---------- */
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Food First Backgrounder
Institute for Food & Development Policy
Please read informational material on the Institute at
the end of this piece.
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This Backgrounder is based on the authors' new book,
"Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Truth about Rain Forest
Destruction," Food First Books, 1995, foreward by
Vandana Shiva. Order information at end.
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Rethinking Rain Forests:
Biodiversity and Social Justice
by John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto
John Vandermeer is Alfred Thurneau Professor of
Biology at the University of Michigan. Ivette
Perfecto, a native of Puerto Rico, is Associate
Professor of the School of Natural Resources and
the Environment, University of Michigan.
The buzz is unmistakable. A huge chain saw cuts
effortlessly through the wood of a beautiful rain forest
tree, slicing up the trunk it has just felled into
smaller bits to be taken away on giant lumber trucks.
That image is fixed in our minds. It drives us to the
same distraction it has driven so many before us. The
rain forests are physically beautiful and contain the
vast majority of our relatives on this planet. What sort
of person would not be haunted by the sound of chain
saws decimating them?
Yet another image is equally haunting. The bulldozed
wooden shack, formerly the home of a poor family,
constantly reminds us that lives as well as logs are
being cut in most areas of tropical rain forests. Hungry
children wander among the stumps of once majestic rain
forest trees. Their mother cooks over an open fire, and
their father fights the onslaught of weeds that
continually threaten to choke out the crops the family
needs for next year's food. All live in fear that the
bulldozers will come again to destroy their present
home. What sort of person would not be haunted by the
existence of such poverty in a world of plenty?
But for us the power of these two images lies in the way
they are connected, a fact we are reminded of every
morning we slice up bananas on our breakfast cereal. The
banana cannot be grown in the United States, yet it is
one of the most popular fruits here. As we all know, it
is produced in the world's tropical regions, usually in
the same areas where rain forests have flourished in the
past. The link between the decimated forest and the
hungry children is the banana. That is why it is so
easy, as we slice up a banana in Michigan, for our
thoughts to wander to the image of the chain saw slicing
up the rain forest trees and the children who view the
banana as a staple food rather than a luxury.
The majority of life on earth lives in the rain forest.
Close to 80% of the terrestrial species of animals and
plants are to be found there. And this cradle of life is
disappearing at an enormous rate. This is what the
popular press has labeled as the "biodiversity" crisis.
Some view the problem from only a utilitarian point of
view. It is obvious that we depend on biodiversity for
the most elementary aspects of existence-plants convert
the sun's energy to a usable form, animals convert
unusable plants to a product we can use, bacteria in our
stomachs help digest our food. There are a host of other
critical functions of life's diversity and furthermore,
future utilitarian designs on biodiversity are most
likely to follow the patterns of the past-medicines and
genes for new crops being the obvious examples. Yet even
if these utilitarian concerns were absent, the spiritual
concern that the world's biodiversity is being destroyed
should be enough to drive us to action. Less than 50% of
the original tropical rain forests of the world are
left, and at the present rate of destruction almost all
will be gone by 2025. Our families, our memories-indeed
a piece of our humanness-will have been destroyed
forever. For this reason many have sounded the alarm and
called for action.
While we echo this same alarm, we are concerned that the
calls for action may not be correctly placed. Indeed,
many of these calls are based on one myth or another
about what is causing rain forest destruction. We feel
that these myths act to mask the true issue. In this
Backgrounder we present arguments against the five main
myths of rain forest destruction and argue that a more
complex understanding is necessary to grasp what is
causing the destruction of the world's rain forests. So
we begin with an analysis of the five myths and conclude
with a description of "the causal web," the true cause
of rain forest destruction.
Myth One:
Loggers and logging companies are decimating the rain
forest.
Certainly the most immediate and visually spectacular
cause of tropical rain forest destruction is logging.
Cutting trees is nothing new. The use of rain forest
wood has been traditional for most human societies in
contact with these ecosystems. But the European invasion
of tropical lands accelerated wood cutting enormously,
as tropical woods began contributing to the development
of the modern industrial society.(1)
The direct consequences of logging, apart from the
obvious and dramatic visual effects, are largely
unknown. Some facts are deducible from general
ecological principles, and a handful of studies have
actually measured a few of the consequences, but a
detailed knowledge of the direct consequences of logging
is lacking. What can be deduced from ecological
principles is not that tropical forests are irreparably
damaged by logging, but quite the contrary: tropical
forests are potentially quite resilient to disturbance.
While this is a debatable deduction, most of the debate
centers on how fast a forest will recover after a major
disturbance, such as logging, not on whether it will.
The process of ecological succession inevitably begins
after logging, and the proper question to ask, then, is:
how long will it take for the forest to recover?
In analyzing the effects of logging, we cannot assume a
uniform process. There are a variety of logging
techniques, some likely to lead to rapid forest
recovery, others necessitating a longer period for
recovery. For example, local residents frequently chop
down trees for their own use as fence posts, charcoal,
or dugout canoes. Forest recovery after such an
intrusion can be thought of as virtually instantaneous,
since the removal of a single tree is similar to a tree
dying of natural causes, a perfectly natural process
that happens regularly in all forests. At the other
extreme is clear cutting, the extraction of all trees in
an area. Though the physical nature of a clear cut
forest is spectacularly different from the mature
forest, from other perspectives the damage is not quite
as dramatic as it appears. The process of secondary
succession that begins immediately after such logging
leads rapidly to the establishment of secondary forest.
A great deal of biological diversity is contained in a
secondary forest. Indeed, a late secondary forest is
likely to appear indistinguishable from an old-growth
forest to all but the most sophisticated observer, even
though it may have been initiated from a clear cut.
Large expanses of secondary forest may even contain more
biological diversity than similar expanses of old-growth
forest.(2) No studies thus far have followed such an
area to its return to a "mature" forest again,(3) but a
reasonable estimate is that it would take something on
the order of 40 to 80 years before the area begins to
regain the structure of an old growth forest.
Probably the most common type of commercial logging is
not the clear cutting described above but, rather,
selective logging. In an area of tropical forest that
may contain 400 or more species of trees, only twenty or
thirty will be of commercial importance.(4) Thus, a
logging company usually seeks out areas with
particularly large concentrations of the valuable
species and ignores the rest. Often the wood is so
valuable that it makes economic sense to build a road to
extract just a few trees. Yet these roads offer new
access to the forest for hunters, miners, and peasant
agriculturists. In most situations this aspect of
selective logging contributes most egregiously to
deforestation, but it is obviously an indirect
consequence of the logging operation itself.
A selectively logged forest is damaged, but not
destroyed. Even a single year after the selective
logging the forest begins taking on the appearance of a
"real" forest. If no further cutting occurs, the
selectively logged forest may regain the structural
features of old growth after ten or twenty years.
Although the scars of selective logging wi ll remain for
decades to a trained eye, the general structure of the
forest may rapidly return. But this is not to say
selective logging is, in the end, benign. The roads and
partial clearings are obvious entrance points for
peasant agriculture, as described below.
Myth Two:
Peasant farmers are increasing in numbers and cut down
rain forests to make farms to feed their families.
This myth is especially popular among neo-Malthusians.
The explosive growth in the population of poor people in
most tropical countries of the world is seen as a
consequence of the basic forces that cause populations
to grow generally, and a simple extrapolation suggests
that even if this is not the main problem now, it
certainly will be if population growth is not somehow
curtailed.
Debunking the neo-Malthusian myth is not our purpose
here; that has been done well elsewhere.(5) Rather,
laying the blame for the destruction of the forest on
the peasant farmer is really blaming the victim. Peasant
farmers in most rain forest areas are forced to farm
under circumstances that are unfavorable, to say the
least, from both an ecological and sociopolitical point
of view.
At the outset, we must acknowledge the temptation to
assume that, in rain forest areas, the potential for
agriculture is great. Since there is neither winter nor
lack of water, two of the main limiting factors for
agriculture in other areas of the world, it is easy to
conclude that production might very well be cornucopian.
The tremendously lush vegetation of a tropical rain
forest only heightens this impression, and indeed this
perception may ultimately be valid. The ability to
produce for twelve months of the year without worrying
about irrigation is definitely a positive aspect to
farming in such regions. But, so far at least, the woes
are almost insurmountable, as most farmers forced to
cultivate in rain forest areas can attest. The first
problem is the soils. Rain forest soils are usually
acidic, made up of clay that cannot store nutrients
well, and very low in organic matter.(6) Even if
nutrients are added to the soil they will be utilized
relatively inefficiently because of the acidity, and
then they will be washed out of the system because of
its low storage capacity.
This problem is actually exacerbated by the forest
itself. Because tropical rain forest plants have grown
in these poor soil conditions for millions of years,
they have evolved mechanisms for storing the system's
nutrients in their vegetative matter (leaves, stems,
roots, etc.) If they did not, much of the nutrient
material would simply wash out of the system and no
longer be available to them. This means that a vast
majority of the nutrients in the ecosystem are stored in
plant material rather than in the soil.
Consequently when a forest is cut down and burned, the
nutrients in the vegetation are immediately made
available to any crops that have been planted. The crops
grow vigorously at first, but any nutrients unused
during the first growing season will tend to leach out
of the system. The "poverty" of the soil only becomes
evident during the second growing season. This pattern
is especially invidious when migrant farmers from areas
with relatively stable soils arrive in a rain forest
area. The first year they may produce a bumper crop,
which creates a false sense of security. Then, if the
second year is not a complete failure, almost certainly
the third or fourth is, and the farmer is forced to
move on to cut down another piece of forest.
A second problem is insects, diseases and weeds. The
magnitude of the pest problem is often not fully
anticipated by farmers or planners, and it is only after
problems arise that the surprised agronomists become
concerned. This is unfortunate, since one of the few
things we can predict with confidence is that when rain
forest is converted to agriculture, many pests arrive.
The herbivores that used to eat the plants of the rain
forest are not eliminated when the forest is cut. They
are representatives of the massive biodiversity of
tropical rain forests, and the potential number of them
is enormous. Herbivores can devastate farmers' fields,
and are able to destroy an entire crop in days.
A third problem is that because of the uniformly moist
and warm environment, organisms that cause crop diseases
find rain forest habitats quite hospitable.
Consequently, the potential for losing crops to disease
is far greater than in more temperate climates. Finally,
just as the hot, wet environment is agreeable for crops,
it is also agreeable for competitive plants. Since no
two plants can occupy the same space, frequently the
crop falls victim to the more aggressive vines and
grasses that colonize open areas in tropical rain forest
zones. Weeds are thus an especially difficult problem.
These, then, are some of the ecological problems faced
by the peasant farmer seeking to establish a farm in a
rain forest area. Sociopolitical forces, however, are
far more devastating. And most of those sociopolitical
forces are associated with a different form of
agriculture-modern export agriculture.
When a modern export agricultural operation is set up,
it tends to do two things regarding labor. First, it
purchases, or sometimes steals, land from local peasant
farmers, thus forcing them to move onto more marginal
lands, with the kinds of problems we described above.
Second, it frequently requires more labor than is
locally available, thus acting as a magnet to attract
unemployed people from other regions. Indeed, in most
rain forest areas this magnet effect is a far more
important factor leading to increased local populations
than population growth.
But the modern agricultural operation, as detailed in
the following section, is subject to dramatic
fluctuations in production, since it is usually
intimately connected with world agricultural commodity
markets. Thus, there is a highly variable need for this
labor, which means that today's workers always face the
prospect of becoming tomorrow's peasant farmers.
In the contemporary world most peasant farmers find
themselves in this precarious position. While it is true
that many indigenous groups have lived and farmed in
rain forest areas for hundreds of years and certainly
deserve the world's attention and support in their
attempts at preserving traditional ways of life, the
vast majority of poor peasant farmers today are not
indigenous. Rather, they are people who have been
marginalized by a politico-economic system that needs
them to serve as laborers when times are good, and to
take care of themselves when times are not. As long as
times are good, the banana workers of Central America
have jobs. But when economies sour, many of those banana
workers suddenly become peasant farmers.
So in the end, the myth of the peasant farmers causing
rain forest destruction is perhaps true in the narrow
sense that a knitting needle causes yarn to form a
sweater. But little understanding of what really drives
the process is gained from the simple observation that a
peasant's ax can chop a rain forest tree.
Myth Three:
The transformation of rain forests into large-scale
export agriculture is the main factor leading to
deforestation.
Given the above description of how peasant agriculture
is driven by industrialized agricultural activities, it
is no wonder that many have concluded that the modern
export agricultural system is the ultimate culprit.
Furthermore, the images of large cattle ranchers
purposefully burning Amazon rain forests to make cattle
pastures fuels this interpretation. Again, there is some
merit to this position. However, we feel that it, too,
is an inappropriate window through which to view the
problem of rain forest destruction.
The direct action of large modern agricultural
enterprises is not really as involved in direct rain
forest destruction as is popularly believed. Burning
Amazon rain forests to replace them with cattle ranches
is certainly an example of the direct destruction of
rain forests by "big" agriculture. But the vast majority
of modern agricultural transformations in tropical areas
are confined to areas that had already been converted to
agriculture. Developers of expanding banana plantations
of Central America claim, for example, to be cutting no
primary forest at all. While we doubt their full
sincerity, it does seem that about 90% of the current
expansion is into areas that had long ago been
deforested. Attributing direct deforestation to them is,
as they argue, probably quite unfair. On the other hand,
their activities are not totally unrelated to the
problem, as can be easily seen from a closer examination
of their underlying structure.
The basic structure of modern agriculture is frequently
misunderstood because of an overly romantic notion of
agriculture - the small, independent, family farm, rich
with tradition and a work ethic that even a Puritan
could be impressed with. Such romanticism is fueled by a
confusion between farming and agriculture. Farming is a
resource transformation process in which land, seed, and
labor are converted into, for example, peanuts. It is
Farmer Brown cultivating the land, sowing the seed, and
harvesting the peanuts. Agriculture is the decision to
invest money in this year's peanut production; the use
of a tractor and cultivator to prepare the land; an
automatic seeder for planting; application of
herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, nematodes and
bactericides to kill unwanted pieces of the ecology;
automatic harvest of the commodity; sale of the
commodity to a processing company where it is ground up
and emulsifiers, taste enhances, stabilizers and
preservatives are added; packing in convenient
"pleasing-to-the-consumer" jars; and, finally, marketing
under a sexy brand name. In short, while farming is the
production of peanuts from the land, agriculture is the
production of peanut butter from petroleum.(7) Over the
last two hundred years, and especially in the last
fifty, much farming has been transformed into
agriculture.
The consequence of this evolution is that modern
agriculture is remarkably intrusive on local ecologies.
Take, for example, the establishment of a banana
plantation. When the banana export business began, local
peasant farmers grew most of the bananas and sold them
to shipping companies. Gradually, the shipping companies
turned into the banana producers, with huge areas
devoted to the monocultural production of this single
crop. To establish a modern banana plantation it is
often necessary to construct a complex system of
hydrological control wherein the soil is leveled and
crisscrossed with drainage channels, significantly
altering the physical nature of the soil.
Contemporary banana production even includes burying
plastic tubing in the ground to eliminate the natural
variability in subsurface water depth. Metal monorails
hang from braces placed into cement footings to haul the
bunches of bananas. To avert fungal diseases, heavy use
of fungicides is required, and because of the large
scale of the operation chemical methods of pest control
are the preferred option. The banana plants create an
almost complete shade cover and thus replace all
residual vegetation. Pesticide application is sometimes
intense, other times almost absent, depending on
conditions, but over the long run one can expect an
enormous cumulative input of pesticides, the long-term
consequences of which are unknown but likely to be
unhealthy for both workers and the environment.
A major social transformation is also required. Banana
production tends to promote a local "overpopulation
crisis" by encouraging a great deal of migration into
the area. As the international market for bananas ebbs
and flows, workers are alternatively hired and fired.
When fired, there is little alternative economic
opportunity in banana zones, and displaced workers must
either look for a piece of land to farm, or migrate to
the cities to join the swelling ranks of shanty town
dwellers.
Thus, the direct effect of most modern agricultural
activities is not inexorably linked with the cutting and
burning of rain forests, despite some obvious and
spectacular examples of where it indeed is. More
importantly, the overall operation of the modern
agricultural system is integrated into a bigger picture.
It is that bigger picture that we must examine to
understand the causes of rain forest destruction, as we
argue in the final section of this Backgrounder.
Myth Four:
Local governments institute policies that cause rain
forests to be destroyed.
Probably the most cited example of local government
policy that promotes deforestation is that of the
infamous transmigration programs of the Indonesian
government, in which hundreds of thousands of Javanese
farmers have been displaced to the exceedingly poor
soils of Kalimantan.(8) However, most local government
programs in forestry and agriculture are frequently
dictated by very specific economic and political forces
that are effectively beyond the control of local
governments. Once those forces are understood, it is
difficult to lay the full blame on local governments.
They may be corrupt, they may be inefficient, but in
fact their hands are frequently tied by forces beyond
their control.
Given today's global interconnectedness, in order to
understand the Third World we must view it as embedded
in the modern industrial system. In that system the
people who provide the labor in the production processes
are not the same people who provide the tools, machines
and factories. The former are the workers in the
factories, the latter are the owners of the factories.
The owners of the machines and tools directly make the
management decisions about all production processes. A
good manager tries to minimize all production costs,
including the cost of labor.
However, the owners of the factories face a complicated
and contradictory task. While factory workers constitute
a cost of production to be minimized, they also
participate, along with the multitudes of other workers
in society, in the consumption of products. In trying to
maximize profits, factory owners are concerned that
their factories' products sell for a high price. This
can only happen if workers, in general, are making a lot
of money. In contrast to what is desired at the level of
the factory, the opposite goal is sought at the level
of society. Factory owners must wear two hats, then: one
as owners of the factories, and another as members of a
social class. Owners wish the laborers to receive as
little as possible, but members of the social class
benefit if laborers in general receive as much as
possible (to enable them to purchase the products
produced in the factory). This has long been recognized
as one of the classic contradictions of a modern
economy.
The situation in much of the Third World appears
superficially similar. For the most part we are dealing
with agrarian economies in which there are two obvious
social classes, those who produce crops for export like
cotton, coffee, tea, rubber, bananas, chocolate, beef,
and sugar; and those who produce food for their own
consumption on their own small farms and, when
necessary, provide the labor for export crop producers.
The typical arrangement in the Developed World is an
articulated economy, while that in the Third World is
disarticulated, in that the two main sectors of the
economy are not articulated or connected with one
another. The banana company does not really care whether
its workers make enough money to buy bananas; that is
not its market. The banana company cares that the
workers of the Developed World have purchasing power,
because those are the people expected to buy most of the
bananas.
This disarticulation, or dualism, helps to explain the
differences between analogous classes in the First and
Third Worlds. Flower producers in Colombia do not
concern themselves much over the fact that their workers
cannot buy their products. On the other hand, the
factory owners in the U.S., whether they be private
factories or government owned and/or subsidized
industries, care quite a lot that the working class has
purchasing power. General Motors "cares" that the
general population in the U.S. can afford to buy cars.
Naturally they aim to pay their own workers as little as
possible, but that goal is balanced by their wish for
the workers in general to be good consumers.
Seeing this structure at the national level in an
underdeveloped country causes one to realize that one of
the main, sometimes only, sources of capital to create a
civil society is from agricultural exports. Because of
the disarticulated nature of the economy the dream of
development based on internally derived consumer demand
is pie in the sky, and any realist must acknowledge that
the only conceivable source of capital to invest in
growth must come from exports. And most frequently
agricultural exports are the only possibility. Herein
derives the need for Third World governments to continue
expanding this export agriculture. This need is an
inevitable consequence of the underlying structure of
the general world system. Thus to blame local
governments for initiating policies that are ultimately
damaging to rain forests may be technically correct in
that those policies frequently do just what the critics
say they do -destroy rain forests. But taking a larger
view we see that local governments are effectively
constrained to do exactly that. Indeed, we predict that
most of today's critics would wind up promoting the very
same programs the local governments are currently
promoting, if they were suddenly pushed into the same
position the local governments currently find
themselves.
Myth Five:
Decisions made by international agencies cause rain
forest destruction.
As before, there is some truth to this position. As well
documented, although not yet "retrospected" by Mr.
McNamara, the World Bank has left a trail of rain forest
destruction in the wake of its many socially and
economically destructive programs in the Third World.(9)
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