DISAPPEARING
FORESTS
FORESTS
Ten thousand years ago forests covered roughly half the land surface on earth. Today more than 2 billion hectares of this forested area have disappeared. Of the remaining 6.2 billion ha, 1.5 billion hectares of forest are still undisturbed, and are found largely in remote places like northern Canada and Siberia, and the Congo and Amazon River basins.
Although people have been clearing forests throughout history, creating areas that have since become barren or desert, most of the damage to forests has occurred in the last lk50 years. Half of the world’s tropical rain forests have been destroyed during the twentieth century. In Central America 90 per cent of the rain forest has been destroyed, while only 70,000 square kilometers or 5 per cent of India’s original forest cover of more than 1.5 million square kilometers now remains.
SUBSIDIZED
DEFORESTATION
Logging in the temperate rain forests of the USA and Canada has shown to be uneconomic and it has had to be supported by government subsidies. During the 1980s the North American Forestry Service spent around US $40 million of government (tax payers’) money each year, in this way. This meant that American tax payers were paying millions of dollars to sell some of the world’s largest and oldest trees to countries like Japan at a discounted price. At one stage the prices were so0 artificially low that 400 year old trees were being sold encouraged the felling of ancient woodlands and the establishment of large conifer plantation.
