Conmonv. 7-or. Rev. 58 (3), 1979 CAY THE 'WET TROIPICIAL FOREST SURVIVE?*- Public Disclosure Authorized By JOHN S. SPEARST In this address, I intend to tackle a question about which much healthv controversy, but also considerable confusion has prevailed in the 1970s, namelv the implications of the continuing decline of the world's wet tropical forest area. I shall attempt to summarize what leading experts have saWi about this question during the 1970s, and to interpret, from a practicar forester's point of view, how their conclusions might alfect forestry management and investment decisions in the 1980s. The interpretations which I am making do not reflect an official view of the World Bank. In keeping with the objective of these annual Commonwealth Forestry Association meetings, they are primarily intended to provoke discussion. During the present decade, the rate of tropical deforestation has become a matter of interna- tional concern. The main questions being debated are: -How rapidly is the wet tropical forest being cut our and will it really disappear as some experts claim - wtchin the next 60 to 100 years? -Is there a viable land use alternative for the wvet- tropical forest lands? Public Disclosure Authorized -If the wet tropical forest were to disappear, what would be the global environmental and ecological consequences of its demise? -How will a further decline in the area of the tropical forests atfect future timber supplies? -Assuming that part of the wet tropical forests can be preserved, do natural forest manage- ment systems have any role or should they be replaced by more intensive plantation forestry? The rate of tropical forest destruction The extent to which leading world forestry experts agree on this question is hardly reassuring. Dennis Richardson's (1970) view was: 'There is no technical reason why tropical hardwcGds should not substitute extensively for softwoods in the British market. There is certainlv no shortage of them. Using FAO Global Statistics and National Returns, it has been demonstrated that at a projected 1985 rate 3 of World Imports (80 million m annually), there are sufficient tropical forest resources to last for 400 years!' By contrast, in the World Bank's Forestry Sector Policy Paper (1978), we concluded: Public Disclosure Authorized 'The existing forest stock in developing countries (estimated at 1,200 million ha of mature forest) is currently being removed at the rate of 15 to 20 million ha a year. At this rate, assuming no growth in demand, the remaining tropical forests will disappear in about 60-80 years.' Paul Richards (1973), a leading world authority on tropical rainforest was even more pessimistic: 'The tropical forest eco-system as we have known it will virtually disappear from the face of the earth by the end of the 20th century.' 'Address given at the Annual General Meeting of the Commonwealth Forestry Association, April 10, 1979. t Forestry Adviser to the World Bank, Washington DC. Public Disclosure Authorized -2- COMMONWEALTH FORESTRY REVIEW To try and obtain a more precise assessment of the rate of destruction of the tropical forests, let's look at exactly where the remaining tropical forest resoufces of the wvorld ire located. This mao shows that - and indicares that out ol-somt I hO coLintries in the world, 4butl 37 contain signiticant areas oi tropical hardwood tbrest. - Of these. 16 countr:es locatcd in Latin Arnerica account for about 620 million ha, i.e. 55 per cent of the remaining tropical forest area of the world, 10 countries located in Asia for 300 million ha or 27 per cent, and 10 countries located in Africa for 190 riillion ha, i.e. 18 per cent. In total, the closed canopy tropical hardwood forests in 1975 covered just over one billion ha equivalent to some 40 per cent of the closed forest area of the entire world, This represents just over half of the area in the world originally covered bv tropical forests. Two principal causes of deforestation have been land clearing for agricultural cropping and livestock rmising and wood gathering for fuel. A third cause is lumber harvesting for industrial use, but relative to deforestation, this is far less significant on a global basis rhan the other two. Much of the world's timber and forest products industry is selective:*- logging a relatively small proportion of total standing wvood volume. Since the neolithic revolution, more forests have given .vay to farms and pastures than co anv other form of land use and the spread of agriculture is still the biggest single cause of forest clearing today. Scudies bv Reidar Persson (1974), FAO and other agencies, in the earl. 1970s suggested thar the 'vorld's closed forest areas may have declined bv some 150 to 200 million ha durIng -he period 1963 to 1973. *\Ios't of this forest destruction occurred in i>e:eloping countries: in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the area of closed tropical forest has been reduced bv at least 100 million ha during this cencury, largelv through agricultural encroachment. Adrian Sommer (1976) working in FAO estimated that about 11 million ha a year were being cleared for agricultural settlement but he had conceded that this was only a very approximate estimare. ir was on the basis cf this and other FAO calculations that we con- cluded in writing the World Bank's Forestrv Secror Policv Paper, that the tropical forests of the world might disappear within 60-80 years. Jean Paul Lanlv of FAO and J. Clement of CTFT (1979) have recently been refining and updating Adrian Sommers' exercise and intend to publish a report on this in the near future. Based on their provisional figures and World Bank data derived from our involvement in various tropical setrlement projects, it seems that the countries in which encroachment for agricultural settlement is likely to result in disappearance of signiicant areas of tropical by the year 2000 are: forest in Asia Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Viet Nam, India, Burma and Nepal in Africa Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, Zaire, Cameroon and Madagascar, and in Latin America Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua. If you add up the total area likely to be cut out between 1980 and the year 2000, it comes to about 130 million ha; in other words, by the turn of the century, the world's tropical forests may have declined by about 12 per cent from over 1 billion ha in 1980 to about 900 million ha by the year 2000. This is a slower rate of decline than predicted in earlier studies. In arriving at this figure, an attempt was made to assess the extent to which deliberate government intervention through forest reservation policies might be successful in slowing down the rate of forest clearance. The figure of 130 million ha reflects national Forest Service estimares of the area likely ro be converted to agriculture or other forms of land use not- withstanding Forest Service resistance to encroachment. Not reproduced hier, lEd I. i.e. in excess of one million ha. CAN THE WET TROPICAL FORES-r SURVIVE? Extrapolating bevond the turn of the century is obviously a very speculative business, but applying the principle that a projection based on crystal ball gazing, and common sense, is lik:ely to be as meanine :ialas a mathematical simulation based on dublous statistics mve guess is, that by the year 2050, a map ot the world's remaining .et tropical Corest resource mlght look like this., Bv then, the number of countries containing a significant area if wet tropical forests might have declined from 36 to about 20. Bv the middle of the next century, it seems highly possible that if nothing is done to check world population growth and to control tropical deforestation, the area of wet tropical forest will have shrunk from its present level to something in the order of 500 million ha, and may disappear altogether before the end of the next century. What then would be the human and ecological implications of such a change? - how would it affect thousands of small farmers in the developing countries? - the tropical timber trade? - the forestry profession? Is complete disappearance of the wet tropical forest inevitable? These are the next issues which I intend to examine. One of the problems we face in trying to analyze the future fate of the tropical forest is that soil scientists, land use planners, botanists, agronomists, meteorologists, sociologists, hvdrologists. ecologists, environmentalists and even foresters, all tend to look at this issue from a parochial viewpoint. The volume of specialized literature which has grown up around the subiect would till St. Paul's Cathedral, whereas the number of papers which tackle this issue in an 'holistic' way would probably fit into my briefcase. In what follows, I shall attempt an overall review of what we currently know about the sub- ject highlighting those issues most likelv to be of concern to forest managers in the 1980s. Possible ecological and environmental effects of tropical deforestation conversion of tropical forest to agriculture Destruction of tropical forests frequently induces in foresters a conditioned response similar to that which we might expect from Dr. Pavlov's dogs - namelv - that permanent removal of forest trees is a disaster (probablv for his dogs it is?). Before looking into this proposition a bit further, let me back off for a moment and talk about people instead of forests - i.e. the theme of the Eighth World Forestry Congress. The facts are at this point in time, that over 700 million people in the developing world are living in absolute poverty, a condition of life so characterized by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, high infant mortality and low life expec- tancv, as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency.