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Rain Forest Economics
| Article
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17080 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
2,725 Words |
| Author
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Charles M. Peters
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Tropical rain forests have recently received a lot of attention from the media, and anyone who watches television or reads news magazines can quickly outline the highlights of this story. Rain forests are some of the most complex and least-understood forest ecosystems on earth. They are a storehouse of biological diversity. They regulate climate, protect the soil, act as a watershed for some of the world's major rivers, and provide habitats for an incredible variety of plant, animal, and human populations. The bad news is that several million acres of tropical rain forest are destroyed every year. Tons of carbon are spewed into the atmosphere as these forests are burned; soil fertility and site productivity are drastically reduced; and countless plants and animals, many of which have yet to be described, are lost forever.
Conventional wisdom has it that tropical forests are being converted to cattle pastures, agricultural fields, or plantations of tree crops because these land use practices, although ecologically disruptive, yield higher net revenues than those obtainable from natural forests. The key assumption in this argument is that, with the exception of a few valuable timber trees, primary rain forests simply are not worth very much money.
Two lines of evidence, however appear to challenge the idea that destructive logging and forest clearing make good economic sense. In the first place, lumber and plywood are not the only useful products found in tropical forests. Rain forest trees also produce fruits, edible oils, spices, medicines, fibers, fodder, and a wide assortment of industrial compounds, such as resins, essential oils, gums, latexes, and dyes. Secondly, although many of these so-called minor forest products are collected solely for subsistence use, a substantial number of forest species are also sold in local markets, and a few, such as rattan, brazil nits, rubber and illipe oil (an important ingredient in cocoa butter and many cosmetics), are even traded internationally. These resources, together with the forests that produce them, are obviously worth something. The problem is that few attempts have been made to actually quantify these benefits.
How To Appraise A Rain Forest
Putting a monetary value on a tract of rain forest is essentially a three-step process that incorporates plant taxonomy, ecology, and resource economics. Step one is to identify all of the trees and shrubs occurring within the forest. This, in itself, can be a somewhat lengthy operation because accurate taxonomic identifications usually require a sample of the leaves, flowers, and fruits of each plant. Needless to say, there are certain logistic problems associated with collecting flowers or fruits from the crowns of 100-foot-tall trees. Assuming that all collections are made and a complete list of species can be compiled for the forest, the next part of this step is to determine which of the trees produce useful products. Ethno botanical studies and market surveys of the region are conducted to obtain this type of information.
The second step involved determining what economists call "production functions" for each of the economic tree species encountered in the inventory. For example, given that there are five species of native fruit trees in the forest, how much fruit does each tree produce every year? Or, how much annual diameter growth do the timber trees exhibit? Collecting these growth and yield data inevitably
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