Natural Hazards: Causes and Effects - Disaster Management Center ...

uncontrolled deforestation is a symptom of a society’s inability to get a grip on other
fundamental development problems: agricultural stagnation, grossly unequal land tenure, rising
unemployment, rapid population growth, and the incapacity to regulate private enterprise to
protect the public interest.
Farming
The spread of farming in one form or another is by far the major cause of outright forest loss
today, as it has been through most of human history. Although its extent is often exaggerated,
some potentially arable land yet remains under forest in parts of Africa, Latin America, and
Southeast Asia. Given the population increases in store for these regions, the conversion of
much of this land to agriculture over the coming decades will be necessary.
However, the spread of agriculture is often characterized more by chaos and ecological
destruction than by rationality, even when it is “planned” by governments.
Farming and Rain Forest Soil
In the tropical rain forests, where little is known about soil conditions and potentials, both legal
and illegal colonists are trying to carve farms out of the jungle. Much tropical land colonization,
as U.N. analysts have observed, “is indiscriminate...an ill-advised use of the land. It is merely a
process of trial and error. Very often the chosen forest land cannot support permanent
agriculture. When soil fertility is lost, cultivation is abandoned and the land is often grazed. The
bare soil will frequently return to forest, unless, as is often the case, it is first destroyed by
erosion.” 4 By now even the most ecologically illiterate economic planners realize what biologists
have long said: the apparent fertility of lush jungle soils is often illusory.
Slash-and-Burn Farming
Much of the blame for tropical forest destruction is often laid on the shoulders of shifting
cultivators—those who slash and burn a clearing in the forest, grow crops for a few years until
soil fertility dissipates, and then move on to clear a new patch. However, while itinerant farmers
are indeed major agents of deforestation, it is important to differentiate among the various sorts
of shifting cultivators and the soundness of their methods.
Traditional systems of shifting cultivation entail lengthy fallow periods during which soil fertility is
restored and trees regrow on the cultivated plots. Today many traditional peoples in the
Amazon Basin, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia are still practicing shifting cultivation in
harmony with nature. It is when such farmers get hemmed in by logging companies, the spread
of plantations, or other incursions of modern society that they can become enemies of the
forest. In addition, as human numbers in a given region rise and the free forest area about them
shrinks, fallow cycles are shortened to the point where trees have no chance to regrow.
Many of the “shifting cultivators” causing the greatest forest destruction today are not traditional
practitioners of this art. They are rootless, landless people struggling to make what living they
can amid unfamiliar ecological conditions. In Indonesia, for instance, many of those who have
migrated from crowded Java to the outer islands have found continuous cultivation of the land
unworkable, either because the soils are not appropriate or because promised technical
assistance has not materialized. Many migrants have become new shifting cultivators who
damage the timber and wildlife resources of the areas over which they spread. In Venezuela,
which has a high rate of unemployment and rising numbers of landless peasants, 30,000
families, most of them practicing shifting cultivation, are living within national parks, forest
reserves, and other supposedly protected areas. An influx of shifting cultivators in the