APPENDIX 2 7. Game biomass Area definitions to be determined Sustained yield offtake per year in defined areas around the lake, kg/km2 Hunters and gatherers, families and dependents, numbers (zoonotic contact) Other biomass characteristics. 8. Aquatic biomass Fish: sustained yield offtake, fish harvests, kg per year Other aquatic foodstuffs Fishermen: families and dependents, numbers (water contact). 9. Forestry production Area definitions to be determined Sustained yield harvesting by species defined per unit area around the lake Other forest products Numbers engaged (relevant for zoonotic health risks) 10. Ecosystem characteristics: soils, rainfall, vegetation Ecosystem area definitions to be determined both upstream and downstream, within the watershed, and beyond Rainfall, mm/year Rainfall, number of dry and/or wet months per Temperatures per month and per year. Evaporation Evapotranspiration Soil distributions, catenas, profiles Watershed: monitoring of erosion sources protection: reserves, fences, barriers, boundaries Water-table characteristics; seasonal flux, and time trends, run-off, parameters, seasonal and other Vari ations Vegetation patterns, floristic communities, species, stab ility and flux, measures, faunal communities, types. 11. Power production Service areas both regional and national to be defined Other engineering characteristics. 12. Lake transport and communications Service areas to be defined Wider connections to be defined People per km per year by type of lake vehicle Volume of goods per km per year by type of lake vehicle Value of goods per km per year by type of lake vehicle Schedules, informal commercial Transportation axes by direction by distance. 13. Population: settlement and demography variables Appropriate area definitions to be made for each popu lation group Numbers displaced and relocated, 'relocatees' Numbers involved in 'host' communities Numbers of immigrants' Migration, 'source' regional characteristics Age, sex, demographic characteristics of the four population groups, viz. relocatees, hosts, immigrants, and the stable, residual communities Geographical spheres of influence of the water impoundment scheme Villages, towns, settlement patterns, by lake location Settlements by other environmental and population characteristics Settlement patterns of populations at disease risk. 14, Population: employment and occupational activities Area specific definitions necessary Numbers and characteristics: fishing Number and characteristics: irrigation project, work by field plots and by techniques (occupational water contact) Numbers and characteristics: traditional livestock raising ..Numbers and characteristics: traditional hunting and gathering activities Numbers and characteristics: power production employment Numbers and characteristics: trading activities Numbers and characteristics: artisan activities. 15. Human disease variables Area definitions to be made Incidences Other variables. 16. Zoonoses Area definitions to be determined Zoonoses to be listed Other variables. 17. Vector biology cariables Area definitions to be determined Data on prevalence and intensities and infectivity 18. Health care services Area cefinitions to be determined Population vaccination levels Utilization of traditional health care services F Rainforests by James D. Nations and Daniel I. Komer New Americans associate fast food hamburgers or TV dinners with the eradication of Central America's tropical rainforests. But for more than 30 years, the United States' appetite for cheap, imported beef has been a critical factor in the future of those forests. Tropical rainforests throughout Central America (including southeastern Mexico and Panama) are being replaced by pasturelands to produce beef, much of which is consumed by U.S. citizens. This cycle of destruction of rainforests and use of the land to produce beef for export involves international bank loans to support cattle industry development, U.S. Department of Agriculture inspections to control undesirable ingredients, and the continuation of a socioeconomic system that concentrates land holdings-and thus power-in the hands of the few. The destruction of rainforests in other areas of the world is sometimes even more dramatic than in Central America-as in the Amazon Basin where bulldozing, burning, and chemical defoliation destroy immense tracts of forest each year. But nowhere is the loss of biological 12 diversity more severe, and nowhere is the United States' unwitting role in deforestation more apparent, than in the case of Central America. Almost two-thirds of Central America's lowland and lower montane rainforest have been cleared or severely degraded since 1950.' At current rates of destruction, most of the remaining forest will be eradicated during the next 20 years, leaving only impoverished remnants in national parks and reserves. Despite the grim ecological consequences of such a prospect, some hope remains to break this cycle. Because the causes of deforestation in Central America are so apparent, the measures required to halt it are also obvious. Logging, then Colonization While some scientists and many Latin American politicians blame the slash-and-burn agriculture of Indian and peasant farmers for the destruction of Central America's tropical forests, in reality the problem results from a combination of local, regional, and international activities. In fact, forest conversion in Central America usually occurs in stages. Can the Cycle Be Broken? During the first stage, logging companies enter the forest to extract valuable hardwoods such as mahogany and tropical cedar. Because the trees of the rainforest are locked together in an intertangled web of leaves, vines, and lianas, felling these selected species damages many non-commercial trees that are left behind. Studies indicate that between 30 and 50 percent of the forest canopy may be destroyed or damaged through this process of "creaming" or "high-topping" the rainforest." But the damage wrought by commercial logging is not so much the result of what foresters remove from the forests as what they leave behind-namely, the roads they construct to enter and exploit the area. Road construction introduces the second stage of deforestation: colonization. For down these roads, like leafcutter ants on a forest trail, come landless peasants from other areas of the country. Using agricultural traditions that are ill suited to the tropical rainforest, they clear and burn the JAMES D. NATIONS and DANIEL I. KOMER serve on the staff of the Center for Human Ecology, Austin, Texas. Portions of this article appeared in Cultural Survival Quarterly. 13 Table 1. LOWLAND AND LOWER MONTANE TROPICAL RAINFOREST IN MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA, AND PANAMA vegetation to plant subsistence crops corn, beans, rice, and manioc-and small-scale cash crops such as coffee, chilies, bananas, and cacao. This colonization has a heavy impact on any indigenous people who live in the region. Indian groups who have survived the diseases and disruptions of timber exploitation may be overrun by colonizing peasants who have little regard for the territory's aboriginal inhabitants and little ecological awareness of their new forest home. But to blame colonizing peasants for uprooting tribal people and burning the rainforest is tantamount to blaming soldiers for causing wars. Peasant colonies carry out much of the work of deforestation in Central America, but they are mere pawns in a general's game. To understand the colonists' role in deforestation, one must ask why these families enter the rainforest in the first place. The answer is simple: because there is no land for them elsewhere. Behind that answer are several underlying factors, among them inequitable land distribution and population growth. Central American government officials promote jungle colonization projects or tolerate "spontaneous" colonization partly because doing so temporarily 14 600 km2 32 km2 600 km2 --km2 4,032 km2 relieves pressures for land reform in other areas of the country, thus reducing demands to break up and redistribute large estates and company holdings. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in Latin America as a whole, 7 percent of the landowners control a surprising 93 percent of the arable land, In Guatemala, for example, 2.2 percent of the population own 70 percent of the agricultural land, mostly in the form of coffee and banana plantations and cattle ranches. Until 1979, Anastasio Somoza and his family owned 23 percent of Nicaragua's arable land. In sum, well over half of the rural families in Central America either own no land or own too little to support a family. Instead, they farm marginal plots and work as laborers on land that belongs to others, all the while waiting for the day when they can own adequate farms.' Population growth is an equally important force behind rainforest colonization in Central America. In mid-1981, almost 35 million people lived in rural Mexico and Central America. By the end of the century, they will be joined by 22 million more, the product of the region's astounding 2.7 percent per year rate of natural increase. In Central America, as in the rest of the world, 90 percent of the expected population growth during the next 20 years will take place in areas that are now covered, or formerly were covered, by tropical forests. The combination of inequitable land distribution and population growth can produce severe social strife and near-total deforestation, as the prime example of El Salvador demonstrates. Export Beef Production With colonization comes the third stage of tropical deforestation in Central America. During this final stage, land cleared by Indian and immigrant farm families is absorbed by individuals or companies who use it to produce export crops-sugar cane, bananas, pineapples, coffee, oil palm, or beef cattle. In Central America, the most dominant and most destructive of these export crops is beef. Peasant families who colonize rainforests in Central America usually intend to remain on the land indefinitely. But as geographer James J. Parsons has pointed out, After one or two crops of maize, rice, or manioc are harvested from the forest clearing, declining soil fertility, invasive weeds, and noxious insects combine to force the colonists to sell out to a second wave of settlers or speculators who follow behind, consolidating small holdings into larger ones for the exclusive purpose of raising beef cattle." In this sense, Parsons continues, the crops planted by forest farmers serve as a transient stage between forest clearing and pastureland. Thus, the pioneer families receive a few years of crops in exchange for converting the rainforest to grassland for the benefit of someone else. Cattlemen are not always so patient, however. In southeastern Mexico and Honduras, ranchers sometimes hire peasants or Indians to cut and burn the rainforest and plant pasture grasses." In the Darién rainforest of southeastern Panama, peasant families migrate into national forests, cut and burn the vegetation, then plant grass and sell the plots as "improved land" for $80 per hectare April 1983 23-588 0-83--10 |