Deforestation is an issue that is significantly growing in a daily basis. We might ask ourselves why is this issue keeps on going even there is so much attention given to it. The world's rain forest can completely vanish in a hundred year with the current rate of deforestation. Various factors come into play in this problem. We will discuss a few of the major contributors towards deforestation in this section.
Agriculture
Tremendous amounts of land are cleared annually to make way for agriculture to take place. Usually flat rain forests are cleared to allow essential crops like maize and paddy to grow. The increasing amount of human population drives the demand for more supply in agriculture. Farmers cut forests to provide more space for planting crops or grazing livestock. Most of the times, small farmers clear small amounts of land to feed their families by cutting down trees and burning them in a process known as "slash and burn" agriculture. (NatGeo)
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| Novel Image: This image shows how an increase in human population can eventually lead to deforestation(Forestland being cleared to make way for agriculture). The sizes of the arrows show how big of an effect each box can cause another. |
Illegal Logging
Illegal logging tends to take place almost anywhere where rare species of timber exists. This scenario is easily seen in the Malaysian rain forests. 62% of Malaysia's land is covered with forests and 19% of it is primary forest(old-growth forest). For the past twenty years, Malaysia has been experiencing a fluctuating rate of deforestation. From 2000 to 2005, the deforestation rate has doubled compared for the rates in 1999 to 2000.(Illegal logging portal) This is because logging plays a huge role in the country's economy. The Borneo forest is well known for having a
wide range of unique timber species which leads to an increasing demand in timber which results in an alarming rate of illegal logging. To make things worse, illegal logging usually takes place during night times that makes it more difficult for forest rangers to get a hold of them. Not only that, selective logging (only most valuable tree chopped down) that takes place can bring down dozens of surrounding trees and the forest's protective canopy. (Butler, 2012). The conflict that arises here is how can we extract these resources from our amazing forests without causing any serious threats to the forest and the community around the affected area.
Malaysia is a developing country that has been the largest oil palm producers in the last decade. We produce almost 85% of the worlds oil palm (SayNoToPalmOil). As of today, 4.49 million hectares of land in Malaysia is used for oil palm plantation. This leads to the production of 17.73 million tonnes of palm oil and 2.13 tonnes of palm kernel oil. (Malaysian Palm Oil Council). Imagine how much forestland that has to be cleared to make way for the oil palm plantation. Oil palm plantation tends to replace tropical forests since oil palm trees grow well in the tropical forest and on a regular elevation. Not only that, the oil palm tree can produce fruits for 30 years which mean this is a very profitable business (Block, 2014).Palm oil is usually found in half of our packaged foods due to its long shelf life compared to other vegetable oils. They tend to be in a semi-solid form in room temperature and has good resistance towards oxidation. Palm oil is also used in cosmetics.
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Novel image synthesized from the amount of land required for oil palm plantation and the amount of flat rain forest area cleared in million hectares. Data obtained from the Malaysian Palm oil council and Borneo Mongabay .com
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| This image is the projection of the amount of rain forest cover we will lose in the future if we keep continuing what we are doing now without thinking about the effect that we might face in the future(Mok, 2007). |
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