Rainforests and their resources are endangered

Press, 3 July 1985, Page 21

Rainforests and their resources are endangered

By

MICHAEL RODDY

of the Associated Press (through NZPA) NZPA-AP New York Rainforests provide the world with food, energy, medicines and a wide range of industrial products, and mankind’s response is to chop down the forests at an alarming rate, says Catherine Caufield in a new book. People, government and businesses — sometimes with the best of intentions — are encroaching on rainforests for mining, hydroelectric power, new settlements, farming, cattle grazing and logging, Ms Caufield says in her new book, “In the Rainforest.” The result, she says, citing United Nations studies and other sources, is that tropical rainforests “are being destroyed faster than any other natural community.” Rainforests, which only a few thousand years ago covered two billion hectares, or 14 per cent of the Earth’s surface, now cover less than half that area, she says. Among her findings: • Brazil is building some of the world’s largest hydroelectric dams, and plans extensive mining in an area the size of France and Britain combined — some 900,000 sq km in the middle of a rainforest. “You wonder how they can seriously suggest it, and it’s not as if Brazil is going to benefit from this . . . they’ll have sold their birthright,” she said, referring to Brazil’s partnerships with Japanese, United

States and other foreign investors. • Indonesia, in an attempt to deal with overpopulation on Bali, is shipping thousands of people under a “transmigration programme” into parts of Sumatra and Sulawesi, where areas once covered by rainforests are now denuded, she says. • In Papua New Guinea, a family has taken up housekeeping in the hulk of an enormous, abandoned dredge that sits in the midst of a scarred landscape where a company stripped the land for gold — in a rainforest. Contrary to popular notion, the loss of rainforests will not cut off essential supplies of oxygen, released by plant life during the process of photosynthesis. According to Ms Caufield, decaying vegetation actually uses up most of the oxygen rainforests produce. But what is threatened, she says, is one of the world’s great sources of diverse plant and animal life, as well as the traditional lifestyles of indigenous forest-dwellers who are being dislocated, forced to give up their native culture and exposed to diseases to which they have no resistance. “The message is that people are being very shortsighted,” she said. Among products of rain forests that have proved a boon to humanity, she cites the following: • Quinine, the common treatment for malaria, one of the world’s most wide-

spread and deadly diseases, was first extracted from the bark of a South American tree, the cinchona, and that tree’s bark remains the source of the most effective quinine. Hundreds of other “folk remedies,” from curare to antibiotics, have been found in rainforests and been adapted to modern medicine, she says. • Vast numers of everyday staples, from yams to coconuts to rice, come from rainforests. The forests remain in some cases the only sources of certain strains of food crops. In one instance, Ms Caufield writes, the only two remaining grains of a rice strain taken from an Indian rainforest were the source of a gene resistant to a rice virus. • Rainforests provide hundreds of products for industry and commerce, including rubber, timber, spices, resins, latex, shellac, oils, tannins, dyes and waxes. Although a great discovery nowadays would seem unlikely, scientists only recently found that oil from copaiba trees in the Amazon can be tapped and used for diesel fuel. But Ms Caufield said everywhere she travelled during nine months of field research that took her to Central and South America, Sumatra, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia, rainforests looked like an endangered species. Ms Caufield is saddened that future generations may never have the opportunity to see these rainforests.