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Causes of Deforestation Essay

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Causes for Deforestation

The Rainforests are being destroyed, daily at alarming rates. The deforestation is caused by three main factors: Commercial Logging, Non-commercial Farming Operations and Commercial Agricultural Development, there are also many minor factors, but the biggest of these is Cocaine production.
Many sources pinpoint commercial logging as the primary culprit in tropical rainforest destruction. Logging damages the rainforest directly through the removal of commercially valuable timber species such as mahogany, rosewood, meranti, kapok and teak. Indirect damage occurs in several ways. As the desired trees fall, they pull down surrounding lianas and epiphytic growth (vines); a single tree and its epiphytes may …show more content…

A second type of subsistence agriculture is what the Rainforest Information Center identifies as farming by shifted cultivators. In fact, the RIC suggests that over half of tropical rainforest loss is due to shifted cultivators. These are farmers who have been forced (shifted) off of their own land by the forces of development (such as mining or large scale ranching). Their only alternative for survival is to develop a small farmstead by cutting and burning the rainforest. Commercial Agricultural Development is the third major cause of deforestation. This type of agricultural is usually based on large land holdings by a few individuals or by the government. Cattle ranching, to produce cheaper beef for developed nations is often cited as a prime example of how this type of agriculture harms tropical rainforests. In literature provided at the 1998 International Educator’s Rainforest Workshop in Peru, the demand for beef was said to have accounted for 72% of the deforestation in Brazil in the 1970’s. Incidentally, many rainforest activists have pointed out that much of the beef raised on these ranches makes it way into American fast-food hamburgers, a cause for consumer introspection on our part. Costa Rica has in many respects done an admirable job of rainforest remains but how much of it has been converted to pasture land. In

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