Cause of Deforestation in Southeast Asia (Essay - Review from draft 2)

After four billion years of organic evolution on this planet, life reached its greatest diversity and complexity in the tropical rain forest (Sponsel et al., 1996). Yet in recent decades this diversity has become endangered. This is due to the deforestation that has been work for centuries and the rate of deforestation in tropics is still increasing rapidly. According to Repetto, current rate of deforestation has exceeded 0.4 hectares per second (Sponsel et al., 1996), and each hectare may contain millions of species. There are more and more species extincting from year to year. Thus, deforestation has become one of the major environmental issues that directly affected not only countries and locations, but also a global perspective. In general, we can classify the causes of deforestation into three main groups, which are timber industry, agriculture development or expansion and major development projects that are implemented by the local government.

Firstly, according to the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific (ESCAP), “Logging is undoubtedly the primary cause of degradation and indirectly of deforestation too (Sponsel et al., 1996).” Logging for export is a major factor of deforestation in Southeast Asia and it has been playing a significant role in Southeast Asian nation’s economic development. For example, in 1985, Malaysia is the largest exporter of tropical hardwood logs which had exported 11.4 million cubic meters of logs (Sponsel et al., 1996). The revenue that was brought into Malaysia from this exported timber had reached the value of RM1.6 billion (US$650 million) in1985 (Hurst, 1990). The high revenue leads to illegal logging which further destroys the forest area. Even though the local government has implemented a number of regulations to control a logging operation, but the timber extraction is still dominated by economic consideration. Thus, due to the economy benefit, logging is just a first step in the chain reaction of deforestation.

Secondly, the agriculture expansion is another major cause of forest clearance. Rural population growth and promotion of cash crops for export are the underlying causes of demand for new land. As the population grows, large numbers of people will be seeking farming land or moving to the cities. For example, in Malaysia, forest clearance for agriculture development has been co-ordinate by federal government, Federal Land Development Agency (FELDA) since independence (Hurst, 1990). The main purpose of FELDA is to help provide land for the landless. They provide large areas of rubber estates or even now oil palm plantations to the landless as an agribusiness or commercial agriculture. The FELDA policies had created job opportunities for more than 500,000 people and have been relocated in more than 100,000 family units (Hurst, 1990). According to Marcoux (2000, June), oil palm plantations are a major catalyst of deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. These two world’s biggest palm oil producers had about 6.7 million hectares of oil palm plantation in 2002(Marcoux, 2000). Hence, the rapid expansion of the agriculture will further clearly cut the forest and there will be one day where Malaysia is running out of land.

Thirdly, some of the major development projects that are implemented by the local government also contribute to the deforestation. The expansion of the road network is one of the projects that provide a significant effect to the forest. For example, North-South Expressway (NSE) in Malaysia which is the longest expressway in Malaysia running form Bukit Hitam in Kedah to Johor Bahru in south Malaysia, opened up millions of kilometres of previously inaccessible forest to link up many major cities in western Peninsular Malaysia, acting as a 'backbone' of the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Another development project is the dam construction. For example, some of the largest dam that had been constructed in Thailand like Bhumibol (318 sq. km); Khao Leam (353 sq. km); Sirikit (260 sq.km); Sirindhorn (292 sq.km); Srinagarind (419 sq. km) and Ubolratana (410 sq. km) (Hurst,1990). The surface areas indicate how much forest had been destroyed. Furthermore, the construction of the dams will cause farmers’ losing their lands and therefore government need to provide resettlement programmes to find new lands for them. As a result, more forests will be clearly cut. Thus, these unavoidable rural development projects have brought a great “pain” to the forest and it is still continuing “attacking” the forest.

In conclusion, as the population increase and with the demand of land, a degree of forest destruction is inevitable. Thus, timber industry, agriculture development and major development projects that are implemented by the local government directly caused the deforestation. Thus, there is a need to consider the development solutions of the crisis in the social, environmental, economic and political aspects, or else it will bring serious consequences to the environment and human.