448 Richard T. Corlett and Richard B. Primack
Asia
Southeast Asia has less than half its forest
remaining and has the highest rates of forest
loss and degradation in the tropics (Achardet al.
2002; Table 26.1). Moreover, the rate of clear-
ance increased during the 1980s and 1990s
(DeFrieset al. 2002) and is probably still increas-
ing. Although poverty and population growth
play an important role in the destruction of the
region’s rainforests, the high rates seen today
result from a combination of logging and con-
version of forest to cash crops or industrial tim-
ber plantations (Corlett 2005, Mackinnon 2005).
The vertebrate fauna of the remaining forests is
threatened by unsustainable hunting pressure,
driven increasingly by a massive regional trade in
wild animals and their parts for luxury foods, tra-
ditional medicines, trophies, raw materials, and
pets (Corlett 2007).
Indonesia has most of the region’s surviving
rainforests, but it has also replaced the Philippines
as the region’s new “rainforest disaster area”
(e.g., Jepsonet al. 2001, Curranet al. 2004). The
rate of forest loss in Indonesia is accelerating,
with recent estimates putting it at 20,000 km^2
per year, about 2% of the remaining forest (Barber
et al. 2002). Indonesia is the world’s largest
supplier of plywood and other processed wood
products, creating a huge demand for wood that
ismetlargelybyillegallogging(Barberet al.2002).
As elsewhere, logging promotes deforestation by
providing access to farmers. In Indonesia, how-
ever, the same industrial conglomerates control
much of the logging, wood processing, and plan-
tation industries, so the link between logging and
deforestation is often more direct, with logging
just the first stage in the conversion of rainfor-
est into a plantation monoculture (Barberet al.
2002, Curranet al. 2004). Two-thirds of the
plantations on former forest land in Indonesia
consist of oil palm, which covered an estimated
3 million ha in the year 2000 (Glastraet al. 2002).
Global demand for palm oil is expected to double
in the next 20 years, and half of the new plan-
tation land required to expand production likely
will be in Indonesia. Most of this will come from
the conversion of lowland rainforests in Sumatra,
Kalimantan, and Papua. In an additional twist,
proposals for new plantations in Indonesia are
often used as an excuse for logging in areas
that are unsuitable for oil palm (Sandkeret al.
2007).AfricaThe rainforest countries of Africa combine
rapid population growth with extreme poverty
(Table 26.1). Political instability and armed
conflicts have been an additional problem in sev-
eral countries, with varied, but generally negative,
impacts on the rainforest (e.g., Draulans and
Van Krunkelsven 2002). The rainforests of West
Africa are largely gone, and the remnants are
threatened by a dense, growing human popula-
tion (Minnemeyer 2002). Vast areas of rainforest
still remain in Central Africa, but these face a
variety of threats (Zhanget al. 2005). Large
areas of rainforest remain relatively intact in
the Democratic Republic of Congo (the DRC, for-
merly Zaire) because the road and river networks
there do not provide adequate access to log-
gers, commercial hunters, and landless migrants
(Minnemeyer 2002). Throughout the accessible
forests of the region, however, subsistence and
commercial hunting of wildlife is intense; meat
from wild game is an important protein source
for rural populations and sometimes preferred to
domestic meat even in urban areas (Wilkieet al.
2005). In most areas, defaunation rather than
deforestation is the primary problem at present
(Minnemeyer 2002). The greatest threat in the
immediate future is that the expansion of log-
ging activity will open up isolated areas to hunters
and migrant farmers (Zhanget al. 2005). Logging
concessions now cover almost half the Central
African rainforest (Minnemeyer 2002). The pro-
jected human population for the DRC by the year
2050 is 200 million (United Nations Population
Division 2001), so deforestation seems certain to
accelerate.MadagascarThe biodiversity of Madagascar is “extraordinar-
ily distinctive, diverse, and endangered” (Yoder
et al. 2005). Nearly 90 million years of isolation