The world's tropical rain forests are being cleared at an ever-increasing and alarming rate. If their destruction continues, such forests will virtually disappear over the next half century, with grave consequences to mankind.
The major exploiters of the humid tropical forests are timber companies, also crop and livestock farmers. Arguably, the greatest threat comes from the many millions of small-scale farmers. If sizeable 'islands' of original rain forest are to be preserved for scientific study and balanced ecological utilization, the rising demands for timber, subsistence crop and grazing land will need to be satisfied in ways other than those currently practised.
An overall goal is the integrated development of resources within areas of secondary tropical forest and savanna woodland. If small farmers are to be encouraged to remain in such areas, successful techniques need to be devised to ensure virtually continuous cropping. The strategy of utilizing fast-growing suitable trees as nutrient 'pumps' and for branch mulching is described. The use of appropriate miniaturized equipment and zero tillage is also advocated.
It is not intended that these and other measures should provide a permanent blueprint for more intensive small-scale farming in the humid tropics. The penetration of more sophisticated systems subsumed under the "Green Revolution" should continue. It may be discovered ultimately that an amalgam of traditional and new practices will best achieve the objective of raising the rural poor of the Third World above the meageress and meanness of their present predicament.
On the face of it, the vast tropical moist forests --of Amazonia, of West Africa, of the Congo --would seem to be simply waiting for exploitation on the basis of sustained yield. But it is beginning to be realized that we know too little about these immensely complex ecosystems to be able to say, with certainity, how sustained yields and lasting exploitation are to be secured.