| "The past two decades in the history of tropical forests have produced ambiguous results. In many places reserved forests have indeed become more insular, but in others impressive secondary forests have flourished." |
The years rolled away when, striking out into the rainforest region, I got lost in the labyrinth of timber roads as I had done so many times before - signposts are not a feature of the Ghanaian landscape. But the sense of familiarity became overwhelming when, to my great relief, I discovered the giant trees still forming a dense canopy over the forest reserves. To be sure, some areas had become more isolated as slash-and-burn farmers had cleared neighbouring trees, yet others were even less accessible than I remembered.
Trees have fallen across timber roads that are now covered with a carpet of creepers, ferns and seedlings. Some bush camps I used to reach by Land Rover now demand a rough three hours on foot, and the camps themselves have more often than not rotted away in the heat and humidity of the rainforest climate.
I also discovered, to my amazement, that former clearings and building sites had turned into something resembling a respectable Europe oak forest, while individual trees I had known when they were the size of an elephant's foot now boasted stems looking more like old factory chimneys.
Much of the credit for all this must go to Ghana's President, Jerry Rawlings. He has managed not only to restore confidence in his country's leadership but also to encourage his government to emphasise the need for conservation of natural resources. I felt, when I talked to him, a strong commitment to preserve the country's remaining forests.
Of course Ghana has learned its lessons the hard way and that is perhaps why it is a little farther down the road other countries will undoubtedly be obliged to follow. Despite a severe economic crisis in the 1980s, which could have led to vast destruction of forests for subsistence agriculture, the Ghanaians have not made a bad job of conservation. But the message from those forests is surely that there are for others easier ways of learning.
The past two decades in the history of tropical forests have produced ambiguous results. In many places, reserved forests have indeed become more insular, but in others impressive secondary forests have flourished. What is beyond doubt, though, is that we know much more than we did 20 years ago.
When I left Ghana at the end of the 1970s the prevailing belief was that selective logging was sustainable . The widespread destruction of tropical moist forests that was then becoming known on the basis of specialist reports was blamed on agricultural expansion or the so-called firewood crisis - although the latter was never a relevant factor in tropical rainforests. Governments, foresters and, not least, international institutions failed to recognise that the pacemaker in forest destruction was actually the timber industry.
Apologists pointed to the fact that timber extraction was often very selective, perhaps just one or two trees per hectare in Africa, for instance. What was overlooked were the ultimate consequences of logging. Not only does timber extraction waste or damage many more trees than it uses but, what is worse, the very fact of its existence and the access it requires - no matter how well controlled - opens the way for slash-and-burn farmers who are usually not under control. Logging, you might say, is the thin end of the wedge. However tight the restrictions, it begins a process that all too frequently ends in total destruction.
But even where further degradation is prevented, problems remain. As the head of WWF's International Forest Programme, Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, has pointed out: "Although logging companies claim that they are responsible for only a small percentage of trees felled, this ignores the fact that they are operating in primary or old-growth forests where wildlife is abundant and the best timber is found. Logging in natural forests is destroying a huge range of plants and animals, as well as tree species."
Nor is this simply a problem of tropical forests. Last December, the WWF report Bad Harvest made it clear that in almost all temperate and boreal countries where old-growth forests remain, the timber trade is now the main cause of their loss. In the former Soviet Republic of Latvia, Europe's finest swamp forests - home to beavers, wolves, woodpeckers and the rare black stork - are under serious threat from a 70 per cent increase in timber exports during the past three years. In the Canadian province of Ontario, old growth forest is now reduced to just one per cent of its original area.
If you look at a forest from the perspectives of biodiversity, there is little to choose between replacing it with a plantation or leaving the land to farmers. In both cases the effect on original native wildlife is disastrous. The total number of species might remain the same, but those species will be different: aliens, weeds and primary colonisers. The rare inhabitants of the old-growth forests are lost, because they can only survive in an environment that has developed undisturbed over centuries.
What struck me as I gazed in wonder at those overgrown Ghanaian clearings was the thought that we must look again at our concepts of sustainability. At WWF, we support the use of sustainably produced timber. But for too long we - all of us, foresters, loggers and conservationists - have been fixed upon the primary or old-growth forest areas throughout the world.
It is now clear that when we speak of sustainability, we must also consider the biological quality of the forests that remain to us. That means protecting increasingly isolated old-growth forests from logging and focusing on the management and regeneration of already degraded woodland and the productive capacity of secondary forests, which are actually spreading. We need the wood, but we need the wildlife too.
Dr. Claude Martin,
Director General, WWF,
Reporting for WWF FEATURES.