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pressing so hard on parks that protected land is steadily being lost to invading farmers. And the country's population is
projected to grow fourfold in the next 40 years.[1]
25. Similar population pressures threaten parks in Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and other countries in which a growing but impoverished peasantry is forced to depend on a dwindling natural resource base. The prospects are bleak for parks that do not make important and recognizable contributions to national development objectives.
26. Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Madagascar, Peru, the Philippines, Thailand, and other nations with an unusual abundance of species already suffer a massive flow of farmers from traditional homelands into virgin territories. These areas often include tropical forests, perceived by the migrants encouraged to farm there as 'free' lands available for unimpeded settlement. The people who are already living on such lands at low population densities and with only traditional rights to the land are often swept aside in the rush to develop lands that might better be left in extensively used forest.
27. Many tropical countries with large forest resources have provoked wasteful 'timber booms' by assigning harvesting rights to concessionaires for royalty, rent, and tax payments that are only a small fraction of the net commercial value of the timber harvest. They have compounded the damage caused by these incentives by offering only short-term leases, requiring concessionaires to begin harvesting at once, and adopting royalty systems that induce loggers to harvest only the best trees while doing enormous damage to the remainder. In response, logging entrepreneurs in several countries have leased virtually the entire productive forest area within a few years and have overexploited the resource with little concern for future productivity (while unwittingly opening it for clearing by slash-and-burn cultivators).[2]
28. In Central and South America, many governments have encouraged the large-scale conversion of tropical forests to livestock ranches. Many of these ranches have proved ecologically and economically unsound, as the underlying soils are soon depleted of nutrients; weed species replace planted grasses, and pasture productivity declines abruptly. Yet tens of millions of hectares of tropical forest have been lost to such ranches, largely because governments have underwritten the conversions with large land grants, tax credits and tax holidays, subsidized loans, and other inducements.[3]
29. The promotion of tropical timber imports into certain industrial countries, through low tariffs and favourable trade incentives, combined with weak domestic forest policies in tropical countries and with high costs and disincentives to harvesting in industrial countries, also drives deforestation. Some industrial countries typically import unprocessed logs either duty-free or at minimal tariff rates. This encourages developed country industries to use logs from tropical forests
