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 ForestForests' Retreat: Page 4 Cambodia's last expanses of tropical forest are being lost in a pattern typical of many countries. Intensive logging during the past 50 years has reduced forest cover in this country from 70 percent to only 35 percent (Mydans 1996b). In spite of a logging ban instituted in January 1996 and a ban on exporting logs set in place in April 1995, the country's two Prime Ministers signed secret concessions to sell off virtually all of Cambodia's remaining forests (Mydans 1996b). The ancient teak forests are being openly felled, with logs exported to neighboring countries for profits of $10 to $20 million per month and in spite of official pledges to stop this logging (Mydans 1996b). Elephants are used to haul the logs across rough terrain, and many are abused with drugs to keep them working and overloaded, causing serious injuries or death. Some have been maimed or killed by stepping on land mines. Armed guards protect these loggers and sawmill operators; regional forestry officials, who oppose the cutting, are unequipped to confront them (Mydans 1996b). Already, siltation, erosion, flooding, and destruction of agricultural fields have resulted, and Cambodia's King Norodom Sihanouk, who appears helpless to stop this situation, commented, "If this deforestation does not stop, Cambodia will be, alas, a desert country in the 21st century" (Mydans 1996b).
Asian logging companies have now turned to the pristine forests of Belize, the only sizeable forests remaining in Central America. In 1997, the government of Belize sold logging rights to Atlantic Industries, a Malaysian company, for $60 an acre to clearcut in primary, old-growth rainforest, principally for mahogany (Hecker 1997). The company logged in areas outside the agreed-upon area and leveled large numbers of Sapodilla trees, the source of chicle that can be tapped sustainably (Hecker 1997). The deforestation of Central America has been most extreme in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica (Collins 1990, Harcourt and Sayer 1996). Fires set by settlers and business interests creating plantations for palm oil and tree farms, burned out of control in the late 1990s in Borneo, Sumatra, Bolivia and Brazil, destroying many ancient forests, including some in national parks.
Secret agreements between various government leaders and international logging corporations or with friends and relatives, for logging rights over large sections of forest are commonplace in many countries. Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, encourage destructive clearcuts in which conservation is not a concern, and fast-paced logging is carried out because the agreements may be negated by a change in government officials (Yates 1992). The largest remaining rainforest in West Africa, a 2.5-million-acre swath in Liberia, is being logged by a Hong Kong timber company as a result of a large bribe paid to the brother of Charles Taylor, the newly elected President of the country (Farah 2001). Such bartering away of the world's greatest treasure-houses of biological diversity is a travesty that will adversely affect the Earth's stability and the lives of many generations of people in the future. Lost will be magnificent ecosystems containing plants and animals not even discovered.
Corporate logging has emerged as the major cause of tropical forest destruction, greater even than the losses to settlers and agriculture. This logging is carried on without international controls and with inadequate national controls. This industry grows each year, and the international trade in wood, pulp and paper is now worth about $100 billion per year, making timber the third most valuable natural resource (Bohan et al. 1996). Of this total, a large percentage is timber from tropical forests. By the mid-1990s, scientists estimated that some 80 percent of Southeast Asia's--and a similar percentage of West African and Madagascar's--forests had been destroyed. An in-depth study of corporate logging by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) estimated total sales of one of the largest corporations, Mitsubishi, at $5.3 billion in 1995, controlling a total land area of 9 million hectares (22.2 million acres) (Bohan et al. 1996). Mitsubishi's plywood mill in the Brazilian Amazon consumes 130,000 cubic meters of logs every year through the intensive and unregulated harvest of virola trees (Bohan et al. 1996). About 75 percent of all tropical forest trees is turned into plywood for disposable packing crates, construction and furniture, according to the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) of San Francisco, California (RAN 1993). The United States alone imports several hundred million pallets of tropical hardwood each year and throws them away after a single use (Revkin 1997).
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