LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Deforestation: Lands
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Deforestation in Amazonia is often not “rational” from the normal financial perspective of paying an attractive return on money invested, at least when only legal money flows are considered. In practice, deforesters make their decisions based on the combined total of all benefit streams, including those that may be undeclared and/or illegal. Investment in Amazonian land can serve as a means of laundering money from illegal sources such as drug trafficking, corruption, sale of stolen goods and income from legitimate activities that is undeclared to tax authorities. For money from these sources the sale of any beef or other products produced in the Amazonian landholdings represents legal income, whereas the investment needed to produce it is highly variable and easily underdeclared to tax authorities.
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As part of the University of Maryland, NASA-funded Landsat Pathfinder Dense Humid Forest Project, Landsat satellite images are used to assess the rates and extent of deforestation in Central Africa. The major limitation of the wall-to-wall mapping approach has been the scarcity of Landsat imagery for the region, because of persistent clouds and irregular archiving of Landsat data sets. Only 19 pairs of Landsat Thematic Mapper images are available for the 1980s-90s period, and most of them (16 pairs) are located in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This scarcity of data has begun to be alleviated by the comprehensive data acquisition strategy of the new Landsat 7 program (http://carpe.umd.edu/landsat/).
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Southern governments and elites ... hold responsibility for some deeper causes of deforestation. Government policies on indigenous peoples' rights - particularly those affecting territorial rights - have been the cause of much deforestation which would not have occurred if those rights had been acknowledged. Policies over land tenure rights in general have resulted in the concentration of the best agricultural lands in a few hands and the consequent migration of poor peasants into the forests, resulting in large-scale felling of trees. In most cases however government policies are linked to external actors such as multilateral institutions, "co-operation" agencies and transnational corporations who must share the blame. Building access roads means that trees are chopped down. The road then opens up the forest to loggers, landless peasants, mining companies and many other actors, resulting in tree clearance.
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The primary goal of tropical deforestation is to clear land for agriculture or cattle raising. The so called "hamburger connection" refers to the fact that a large proportion of tropical rainforest has been destroyed to clear land for cattle grazing to supply the world with beef. Another important cause of deforestation is commercial logging. These two causes involve very different methods of deforestation. When land is cleared for agricultural use, the "slash and burn" method is employed. A large area of land is cleared through burning of the original forest.
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With the rapid deforestation that is occurring in some areas there are numerous side effects that may not be seen immediately. One such change is the change in the landscape and the effects that it may bring about later. One such example is in the Camwood Case where rapid deforestation caused mass flooding in Cambodia. In addition, severe flooding damaged the rice crops and led to food shortages for the country. In another similar case, THAILOG, the Thai government banned harvesting timber following the worst flooding in nearly a century. The same scenario is suspected in Mexico where the deforestation is expected to affect the headwaters of the Rio Conchos , the Rio Grande's largest tributary, which may inevitably affect the drinking water source for the Tarahumara.
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Specific activities that directly reduce deforestation include training on permaculture practices that allow farmers to continually produce good harvests from the same land as opposed to cutting new fields every few years. The project has ... been empowering local communities the transfer of natural resource management rights from the government. This in turn allows the communities themselves to mange their forests and makes them responsible for enforcing forest-use rules. Additional projects include building improved irrigation infrastructure for the lowland rice growing areas. An active dialogue will be maintained with local stakeholders to help ensure protected area limits are proposed and accepted by local and regional authorities.
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