0.13 Natural capital: forestry  (Page 8/14)

Future generations

The economies of many nations with significant remaining tropical forest endowments are strongly dependent upon these natural assets. In forestry, this dependence is much more than a matter of the economic value for wood and non-wood forest products. The spatial dimensions of the protection furnished by intact forests extend not only to adjacent areas and local watersheds, but to faraway water systems and ultimately to seawater, the quality of which is so important to coral reefs and coastal fishing. Soil erosion, siltation, sedimentation, and disruption of water systems arising from deforestation take a heavy annual toll on productivity in agricultural and fisheries. In countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Costa Rica, and Brazil, this toll also threatens the foundation of future jobs and income in tourism, a labor-intensive industry in virtually all countries.

Shortages of tropical forests

Except in a few very low income and not, incidentally, already heavily deforested nations, present and future generations face no shortage of wood. But, continuation of present rates of degradation and deforestation does mean that both present and future generations confront a critical shortage of tropical forests, involving needless destruction of both important tangible economic values, as well as ecological and equity values. Moreover, all indications are that continued shrinking of the world’s tropical forests estate involves sizeable risks of destruction of other important social, biological, and intangible economic values ranging from heightened erosion, loss of productive habitat, both for traditional human forest dwellers and for forest creatures, to climate changes, loss of bio-diversity, as well as extinction of particular species.

Destruction of tangible economic values

Popular discussions of the world tropical forest dilemma often focus upon a supposed clash between economic, as opposed to broader social, values in tropical forest utilization. Positing the problem in this way is appropriate in one limited sense only. Some types of economic returns from forest conversions are not only tangible, and easily measured, but can be easily appropriated by loggers and agriculturists large and small. However, many of the real costs of generating these returns are neither easily assignable to the extractive activities, nor are they clearly apparent. But other types of returns from leaving tropical forest assets intact are not easily appropriable, and are much more intangible. Many of these returns are manifestly economic in nature and stem from both the productive and the protective functions of the forest. It may be seen, then, that quite apart from any clash between more tangible and measurable economic values and broader, less tangible social values in decision-making on forest land use, recent patterns of utilization of natural forest involve conflict between economic values as well. There is conflict on the one hand between considerations of the economic value of wood and land-cleaning for crops and cattle and on the other the economic value both of non-wood forest products and of the palpable, yet not readily measurable economic value of soil and watershed protection furnished by intact forests. In virtually all countries with tropical forest endowments, this conflict consistently has been resolved in favor of the former, more narrow, set of economic values.