THE VANISHING FORESTS OF THE THIRD WORLD
POLSGROVE, CAROL
The Vanishing Forests of the Third World There is a way to prevent wastelands BY CAROL POLSGROVE When I was growing up in Nigeria, we would sometimes, on back roads, drive through bush fires...
...population growth...
...But instituting scientifically based agroforestry systems would require a shift in policy for many Third World countries— and many of their foreign advisers...
...No," he sajd, "but it's corn...
...Under the guidance of its director, Dr...
...Traditional systems for producing food and fuel have been strained to the breaking point by Carol Polsgrove is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...Foresters may prefer to keep their trees to protect watersheds or to sell to foreign companies (developed nations' use of tropical hardwood timber jumped from 4.2 million cubic meters in 1950 to 53.3 million in 1973, according to Norman Myers in his study, The Sinking Ark...
...But the hope that temperate-zone agriculture, as it exists, will save the tropical countries, as they exist, is a false one...
...The traditional system of shifting cultivation was ecologically sound for tropical soils, which rapidly lose nutrients and organic matter to hard rains and oppressive heat...
...In the overgrazed Sahel, the desert spreads...
...Vulnerable to public pressure...
...A farmer could grow trees for paper mills on a seven- or eight-year cycle, and grow crops in the first few years of the cycle—a more productive variant of the old shifting cultivation system, in which only 15 per cent of the timber cleared is actually used...
...What Getahun hopes to do is computerize data about multi-purpose trees and shrubs and improve on traditional combinations, finding out not only what grows best together but under what circumstances: How far apart should plants be grown...
...In cleared tropical forest areas, tough Imperata grass takes hold...
...While this mode of development has produced income for an elite urban class, it has done little to create a system of agriculture which can sustain the new masses...
...Poor farmers cannot afford machines and fertilizers...
...On a field trip with foresters through Kenya's highlands, I saw beautiful mountainside tea and coffee farms, both small and large, but I also saw scraggly patches of corn planted in neighboring dry lands, only recently opened to cultivation...
...Mongi pointed out that development money in agriculture and forestry has gone mainly to "the few target cash crops that contribute most to earning foreign exchange in selected targeted areas...
...Third World governments may be ruthless enough, but they are not strong...
...Nair of the International Council for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), located in Nairobi, agrees: Agroforestry has been ignored "because it has been primarily a subsistence farming system that has been traditionally practiced in the marginal and scientifically neglected areas...
...They have cleared a patch of forest or a stretch of grassland, planted for two or three seasons, and then moved to another spot, leaving the land to be reclaimed by natural vegetation...
...Already, Getahun told me, one rural Nigerian family, without the help of scientists, may grow as many as seventy-five different crops, including trees and shrubs...
...As a system of continuous cultivation, agroforestry has this great virtue: It can protect fragile ecosystems from the damage which other forms of continous cultivation might inflict...
...Trees can keep soil temperatures lower and ease the flow of rainwater...
...The brainchild of Canada's International Development Research Centre, ICRAF was set up in 1978 in Nairobi as an independent agency (its first backers were Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, West Germany...
...While they caution each other against undue optimism, they clearly have faith in agroforestry as a continuous production system which developing countries can institute without undue cost or social and environmental disruption...
...This is the way West African farmers have grown crops for years...
...As a result, I was told by Dr...
...Wealthy farmers who do invest in imported machines put landless laborers out of jobs...
...Give it to us...
...A majority of the delegates from the developing nations were forestry officials, although some agricultural scientists were also present...
...At IITA, the impressive facility (financed largely by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) where Getahun worked on contract, an international collection of researchers is exploring other ways to increase production, mainly through improved plant varieties and minimum tillage techniques...
...When I was last in Nigeria, it was election time, and the Great Nigeria People's Party was promising, according to the local press, "to encourage large scale farming from village to state level" and "mass production of food and cash crops...
...But about one-third of the world's people depend on wood for fuel, and to them, that need seems more pressing...
...With more and more people to feed, farmers in such countries as Nigeria need more arid more land...
...Some lands, especially the dry or mountainous ones, suffer what may be irreparable damage...
...Losing forests, we lose more than just trees—and that loss will be felt, eventually, by all of us...
...What is happening in Nigeria is happening throughout the Third World...
...Chandler of ICRAF pointed out to me that foresters no longer have as an ally the "strong ruthless central government that protected the forest estate" in colonial times...
...Chandler and others in the agroforestry movement believe they offer a better way to meet fuel and food needs—without destroying more forests, degrading marginal lands, or increasing developing nations' dependence on the developed world...
...In response to the breakdown of traditional modes of agriculture, particularly of shifting agriculture, Getahun and a scattering of colleagues in other countries are proposing a sustained production system which they call "agroforestry...
...Humans are—out of desperation, ignorance, shortsightedness, or greed— destroying the basis of their own livelihood as they violate the limits of natural systems," Erik P. Eckholm wrote in a Worldwatch study, Losing Ground...
...Getahun's research, like most agroforestry research, is just beginning/It is not hard to figure out why...
...I talked with a young American agricultural volunteer who was trying to teach farming principles to Nigerian students...
...But the population of Africa is doubling every twenty-five years or so, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that all developing nations' food requirements will be double in 1990 what they were in 1970...
...One way they get it is by cutting fallow periods shorter and shorter...
...As populations have expanded, farmers or would-be farmers have eyed the government forest reserves with longing...
...All semester," he said, "all they wanted to learn to do was drive a tractor...
...Therein lies the hard truth that forestry officials recognize: They are defending their trees against two pressing human needs—the need for food and, only secondarily, the need for fuel...
...Amare Getahun, researcher at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria, "You end up with a wet desert...
...The GNPP further promised "abundant fertilizers and modern farming implements...
...they seek quick and apparently easy ways of satisfying their people, for instance giving them parcels of land—forest land or marginal land which will barely sustain them—while, at the same time, growing cash crops for export on the best agricultural land...
...Under these population pressures, what was once a sound food production system is collapsing...
...According to Gus Speth, who was chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality under President Carter, by the year 2000 as much as 40 per cent of the forests now left in poor countries may be destroyed...
...I remarked to a staff member of the United Nations Environment Program...
...Kenneth F.S...
...King, former head of the forestry department of FAO, ICRAF began building institutional support for agroforestry research and development...
...One of the most promising avenues of research is the project in which Getahun was involved, a project which is part of a new movement in applied science...
...The Vanishing Forests of the Third World There is a way to prevent wastelands BY CAROL POLSGROVE When I was growing up in Nigeria, we would sometimes, on back roads, drive through bush fires deliberately set by farmers to burn off the tall grass and prepare the land for corn and cassava...
...As Colin Norman points out in a WorldWatch paper, Knowledge and Power: The Global Research and Development Budget, only 5 per cent of all research and development money is spent in developing nations: "As long as the world's R&D capacity remains highly concentrated in the industrial world," says Norman, "the focus will continue to be largely on the problems of the rich countries, and the developing world will remain dependent on imported—and often inappropriate—technology for its economic development...
...After two or three years of cultivation, when the soil would be too worn to sustain crops, the fast-growing forest would build it up again...
...I saw a slide show on the government's National Accelerated Food Production Project: The commentator called for "new varieties, more mechanization, more fertilizer, more chemicals...
...But it could also enable the small farmer to fit into what is and will remain a cash economy...
...ICRAF staff member H.O...
...The mountainsides of Nepal wash down into India...
...One of its first major projects was a conference in 1979 which brought together decision-makers from twenty-six developing nations, along with a few representatives of international aid organizations (among them, the German Foundation for International Development, which paid for the conference...
...they can also act as nutrient pumps (the acacia albida, for instance, is a useful arid-zone tree that brings nutrients to upper soil root zones as it fixes atmospheric nitrogen...
...Finally, temperate-zone agriculture may be ineffective or actually destructive in tropical zones: Hard rains leach fertilizer out of the soil and erode large tracts of cleared land...
...Nair and his colleagues at ICRAF are leading the movement to correct that imbalance...
...Furthermore, Mongi said, developing nations have used profits from agriculture and forestry to build up the urban sectors of their economies...
...That's not very good corn, is it...
...When are they best harvested...
...And it is doing virtually permanent damage to the world's forests...
...But the foresters were there in greater numbers, because the pressure for more farmland is threatening the foresters' territory...
...Because it is a system of continuous cultivation, agroforestry offers shifting cultivators a way to increase production to meet immediate needs for food, fuel, and fodder...
...In Kenya, where the government reportedly gives below-cost deals to paper companies for wood grown on government plantations, officials have talked about importing kerosene as an alternative to homemade charcoal—fuel, to save Kenya's forests...
...Shifting cultivation, practiced on almost 30 per cent of the world's tillable soils, worked well enough when it supported a sparse population...
...Under the stress of overcultivation or overgrazing, lands never productive produce less and less...
...When forests are destroyed, air and water quality decline and soil becomes wasteland...
...P.K.R...
...Indeed, agroforestry is not so much a new system as a scientific elaboration of old systems...
...The basic idea of agroforestry is simple—that growing a variety of crops, trees, and shrubs together or in close rotation is, in some instances, better than growing them separately...
...Faced with both environmental deterioration and urgent demands for more food, developing nations have turned for help, not surprisingly, to Western agriculture...
...M.T...
...If their own traditional systems are failing to support their growing numbers, why not import those systems that have sustained dense populations—and an industrial revolution—in the West...
...In Kenya, I heard a government forester defend the conversion of indigenous forest to exotic forest—made up of imported varieties—on the ground that if the forest is left as it is, to protect a watershed, for instance, people will say to the politicians, "Look, that land is wasted...
Vol. 45 • August 1981 • No. 8
