Tropical Forests

Each year, the forested area in the tropics shrinks by nearly one percent. There are many reasons for this. Sustainable forest management, which maintains the economic value of the forest to the affected countries, helps protect natural forests.

Reasons for shrinking forested areas

Rapid population growth in the developing and threshold countries of the tropics is affecting tropical forests in various ways. More and more land is being used for inefficient shifting cultivation (subsistence farming), large forest areas are being converted to the cultivation of food and agricultural products for export, cleared for industrial and energy projects or for settlement, as well as used to provide wood for building and fuel. In the developing countries of the tropical zone, the greatest portion of the wood felled is used for fuel (up to ninety percent in Africa).

Maintaining the value of the forest

The most important way that sustainable forest management helps tropical forests is by maintaining the value of the forest. This calls for managing and exploiting the forests to ensure that local industries can thrive and for making tropical wood processing for export the basis of the local wood industry. Danzer Group has been taking an active part in African industry for decades already. Its commitment is accompanied by investments in competitive and social structures aimed at build up a sustainable and economically profitable local wood industry.

Sustainable forestry in tropical forests

Using wood for industrial purposes is one of the few functioning industries in West and Central Africa, for instance, which is creating jobs and income, as well as tax and export revenues. Sustainable forest management can help decisively to promote the economic and social development of these countries while at the same time helping conserve tropical forests.

Boycott is not a solution

Boycotting tropical wood, by contrast, is counterproductive and damages the tropical forests more than it helps preserve them. A boycott does nothing to change the primary causes of deforestation. Refusing to buy products made of tropical wood causes their price to decline. But the consequence of sinking revenues from wood production is that some developing countries will make increasing use of forested areas in other ways, such as for agriculture.

Selective logging in Africa

Internationally, approximately 126 million cubic meters of tropical wood are produced each year. Of this amount, 64 percent comes from Asia, 26 percent from Latin America and ten percent from Africa. In the Congo Basin, for instance, around 0.46 cubic meters per hectare of forested area were logged in 2003, 1.3 cubic meters in the USA and 2 cubic meters of wood per hectare of forest in the European Union. Within a period of thirty years, Danzer Group fells one tree in an area the size of a soccer field in its three million hectares of forest concessions in the Congo Basin.

In an area the size of a soccer field one tree is felled every 30 years.

Illegal logging is an ecological and economic problem

Another important principle of sustainable wood processing is checking the origin of the logs to make sure that no wood from illegal logging operations comes into circulation. Illegal logging not only destroys important ecosystems, it also has far-reaching economic consequences. Owing to unfair competition from illegal tropical wood, companies that invest in sustainable forest management can hardly hold their own. Illegal logging is particularly a problem in Indonesia. It is estimated that half of the wood logged in this country (sixty million cubic meters) is illegal – nearly twice as much as the entire amount of tropical wood logged in Africa.