SOME PRINCIPAL AGENTS OF TROPICAL DEFORESTATION
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Orange groves have displaced native
habitats in some cases in Belize.
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INTRODUCTION
Globally, the main proximate agents leading to tropical forest destruction and modification are: shifting cultivation (mainly non-mechanized, subsistence cultivation), "industrial scale" agriculture and plantations,
cattle ranching, commercial logging, mining, and construction of dams. To this list may be added firewood gathering, urbanization, and other miscellaneous human activities.
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Banana plantations have claimed
huge areas
of coastal plains rain
forest in Central America.
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The ultimate factors underlying these proximate agents are more social and economical in nature, and include lack of access to land ownership, high costs of renting land, poor levels of education, lack of employment, and other
similar factors.
Some other threats to tropical biota do not stem from deforestation. Indeed, it is distressingly possible to visit forests that appear beautifully intact, and yet are strangely silent. Human hunting for meat--both subsistence
hunting and market hunting--is an important and growing menace to tropical forest biota (Redford 1992, Robinson and Redford 1994, Robinson
and Bennett 1999).
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Creation of cattle pastures is a
major source of
deforestation
in certain portions of Latin America.
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Other important factors affecting tropical forests include global climate change and invasive exotic species.
It is beyond our scope here to describe all of these factors. Much has been written about the importance of these various agents of tropical deforestation, and a wealth of information is available on the worldwide web. Some
useful published sources are listed at the end of this section.
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Log yard of a mahogany-logging
operation
in Chiapas, Mexico.
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Here we discuss two land uses whose effects on forest biota we studied: shifting agriculture and selective mahogany logging.
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