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The tropics are the source of many of our familiar fruits, vegetables, oils, and spice, as well as such commodities as rubber and wood. Moreover, other tropical fruits and vegetables are being introduced into our markets to offer variety to our diet. Now, as tropical forests are increasingly threatened, we face a double-fold crisis: not only the loss of the plants but also rich pools of potentially useful genes. Wild populations of crop plants harbor genes that can improve the productivity and disease resistance of cultivated crops, many of which are vital to developing economies and to global commerce. Eight chapters of this book are devoted to a variety of tropical crops—beverages, fruit, starch, oil, resins, fuelwood, fodder, spices, timber, and nuts—the history of their domestication, their uses today, and the known extent of their gene pools, both domesticated and wild. Drawing on broad research, the authors also consider conservation strategies such as parks and reserves, corporate holdings, gene banks and tissue culture collections, and debt-for-nature swaps. They stress the need for a sensitive balance between conservation and the economic well-being of local populations. If economic growth is part of the conservation effort, local populations and governments will be more strongly motivated to save their natural resources. Distinctly practical and soundly informative, this book provides insight into the overwhelming abundance of tropical forests, an unsettling sense of what we may lose if they are destroyed, and a deep appreciation for the delicate relationships between tropical forest plants and people around the world.
With environmental change and conservation in West Africa's tropical rainforests becoming topics of increasing political and academic interest, this book brings a fresh set of perspectives to the debate - those of the forest dwellers themselves. Based on her detailed field research in the Mende communities around Gola North Forest reserve, and surveying the recent debates and literature concerning forest conservations and current analytical approaches to gender and the environment, Melissa Leach examines the importance of rainforest resources to the local economy and social relations and shows that neither an understanding of forest use and change, nor adequate conservation policies can be achieved without a concern for gender.
Importance pf tropical forests; characteristics of tropical forests; classification of tropical forests; deforestation in the tropics; management of tropical forests; plantatios and agroforestry systems; approaches for implementing sustainable management techniques.
This book has been developed from a workshop on Technological change in agriculture and tropical deforestation organised by the Center for International Forestry Research and held in Costa Rica in March, 1999. It explores how intensification of agriculture affects tropical deforestation using case studies from different geographical regions, using different agricultural products and technologies and in differing demographic situations and market conditions. Guidance is also given on future agricultural research and extension efforts.