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Deforestation: Soil
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Houston Chronicle - The Sakhalin-2 project, led by Royal Dutch Shell PLC, has been accused of inflicting large-scale damage on Sakhalin’s ecosystem, including illegal deforestation, silting salmon-spawning rivers and soil erosion. The troubles at Sakhalin-2 have been
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Slash-and-burn cultivation by small-scale farmers is a particularly common form of tropical deforestation in Africa and south-eastern Asia. After a few years' cropping, many soils support only grassland and scrub, and farmers move to other forests.
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In the humid tropics the horizontal expansion of the different forms of agriculture (and animal husbandry) constitutes the most important direct overall factor, since it is responsible for nearly 85% of deforestation. These figures are compatible with that of 45% of deforestation in the humid tropics due to shifting cultivation estimated by the 1980 FAO inventory, inasmuch as subsistence agriculture includes not only shifting cultivation as such, i.e. with rotation, but all forms of shifting cultivation without rotation as well: subsistence farming opening the way to cattle ranching in tropical America, or moving to very poor soils not likely to be recolonized by forest vegetation for a considerably long time (steep slopes in the Andes, the Himalayas and other mountain areas, and "laterized" soils after cropping, such as West African "bowes" or "alang-alang" areas in Southeast Asia).
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