Throughout South America, large-scale resettlement and agricultural and resource development projects claimed much of the 645,000 square kilometers of forest lost in this region between 1980 and 1990 – the greatest amount of forest loss in the world during these years. Brazil alone lost close to 370,000 square kilometers – more than a fifth of all tropical forest lost worldwide during that time. [46]
Still, South America maintains vast areas of intact tropical and temperate forest. The Northern Amazon Basin and the Guyana Shield house the largest tropical frontier forests anywhere. [47]
On the rim of the Amazon Basin, forests of the Northern Andes (Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia) rank among Earth’s biologically richest. [48] Chile and Argentina share the largest single block of remaining temperate frontier forest in the world.
Logging is the main threat to South America’s frontier forests, endangering about 70 percent of all frontiers classified under medium or high threat. Energy exploration, mining, and new roads are encroaching on about half the region’s threatened frontiers. Clearing for agriculture jeopardizes almost a third of all threatened frontier forests.
In recent decades, national development policies have fueled much of the region’s deforestation. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Brazilian government’s “modernization” policy prompted major forest clearing in the Amazon. The government had hoped to solve land-tenure problems in other regions by establishing colonies of small-holder farmers in the forests, to integrate the region into the rest of the country with a massive road network, earn revenues by developing natural resources and strengthen Brazil’s borders by populating its frontier. Government policies triggered both planned and spontaneous immigration of landless peasants from throughout the country, and resulted in large-scale clearing of the forest by land speculators hoping to profit from subsidies provided to cattle ranchers. [49] [50]
In Bolivia, Guyana, and Suriname, a drive to exploit natural resources over the past decade – partly to respond to economic crises – has accelerated the loss of frontier forests. Only Venezuela and Colombia have strongly restricted logging, mining, and other extractive activities, and Venezuela may soon buckle under severe economic pressure to exploit its rich natural resources. Chile’s temperate frontier forests are increasingly threatened, primarily by logging to provide wood chips (for export mainly to Japan) and fuelwood. While Eucalyptus and pine plantations provide much of the timber needed for export and industry, precious native forests are cleared to make way for new plantations. [51] [52]
| Threatened frontiers include:
Frontier: |
References and notes
46. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Forest Resources Assessment 1990: Global Synthesis, FAO Forestry Paper 124, (Rome: FAO, 1995), Annex 1, p. 21.
47. The Guyana Shield includes part or all of Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela.
48. Peter Raven, personal communication, December 1996.
49. Nigel Smith, Paulo Alvim, Emanuel Serrao, and Italo Falesi, “Amazonia,” in Regions at Risk: Comparisons of Threatened Environments, Jeanne Kasperson, Roger Kasperson and B. L. Turner II, eds., (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1995), p. 41.
50. Caroline Harcourt and Jeffrey Sayer, eds, The Conservation Atlas of Tropical Forests: the Americas, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 230, 238.
51. M. Patricia Marchak, Logging the Globe, (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), p. 321.
52. 52. Steve Gilroy, “Disturbing the Ancients,” in Buzzworm: The Environmental Journal, Vol. IX, No. 1, January/February 1992, p. 41.
