This article, which synthesizes the results of more than 140 economic models analyzing the causes of tropical deforestation, raises significant doubts about many conventional hypotheses in the debate about deforestation. More roads, higher agricultural prices, lower wages, and a shortage of off-farm employment generally lead to more deforestation. How technical change, agricultural input prices, household income levels, and tenure security affect deforestation-if at all-is unknown. The role of macroeconomic factors such as population growth, poverty reduction, national income, economic growth, and foreign debt is also ambiguous. This review, however, finds that policy reforms included in current economic liberalization and adjustment efforts may increase the pressure on forests. Although the boom in deforestation modeling has yielded new insights, weak methodology and poor-quality data make the results of many models questionable. Concern is rising about the adverse consequences of tropical deforestation. The loss of forest cover influences the climate and contributes to a loss of biodiversity. Reduced timber supplies, siltation, flooding, and soil degradation affect economic activity and threaten the livelihoods and cultural integrity of forest-dependent people. Tropical rain forests, which constitute about 41 percent of the total tropical forest cover, are considered the richest and most valuable ecosystem on the earth's land surface. During the 1980s about 15.4 million hectares of tropical forests were lost each year, according to estimates by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO 1992). From 1990 to 1995 the annual loss was estimated at 12.7 million hectares (FAO 1997), but it is unclear whether this reduction represents a slowdown in actual forest clearance or new definitions and better data. This concern has led economists to expand their efforts to model why, where, and to what extent forests are being converted to other land uses. Kaimowitz and Angelsen

The introductory chapter discusses the assumptions behind policies which have led to deforestation of tropical forests, and outlines the aims and scope, and key conclusions of the book. A summary of each chapter in the rest of the book is also included.

For hundreds of millions of people, biodiversity is about eating, staying healthy, and finding shelter. Meeting these people's basic needs should receive greater priority in the conservation agenda. Wild and semi‐wild plants and animals contribute significantly to nutrition, health care, income, and culture in developing countries, and the poorest and most vulnerable people often rely on those resources most. Depleting those resources or making them inaccessible can impoverish these people even further. ‘Pro‐poor conservation’—that is, conservation that aims to support poor people—explicitly seeks to address basic human needs. Such an emphasis has many potential synergies with more conventional conservation goals. Nonetheless, pro‐poor conservation requires a distinct attitude to gauging conservation outcomes and a different approach to conservation science. Biologists can make a vital contribution.

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Ten years ago, you couldn't find Mimosa on a map of Brazil. Back then, the town consisted of little more than a Shell truck stop on an asphalt highway, a backwater in the midst of 500 million acres of untamed scrub trees and grassland. That was before soybean farmers conquered the Cerrado. Today, this frontier boom town in the state of Bahia boasts a population of 15,000, a farm cooperative, two soybean processors, a phosphate fertilizer plant, three machinery dealers, half a dozen chemical dealers, a branch of the Bank of Brazil, a $49-a-night motel and a brand-new country club for the families of the nouveau riche. Dozens of young soybean tycoons traded their fathers' small stakes in Southern Brazil for 30 or 50 times more land in the north. Some quit comfortable $70,000-a-year white-collar jobs in Sao Paulo; others are descendants of Japanese immigrants, subsidized by Asian money. .. Gold may have drawn settlers to California's Wild West, but Mimosa owes its prosperity to soybeans and agricultural technology.

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This paper analyses how macro-economic and agricultural policies, market fluctuations and demographic changes affected forests in the Humid Forest Zone of Cameroon in four periods between 1967 and 1997. For each period it examines how these variables influenced cocoa, coffee, food, and agroindustrial crop production and area, and logging. It concludes that government policies, market fluctuations and demographic changes all had a strong impact on forests. Pressure on forests increased after structural adjustment policies were initiated in the mid-1980s. Malthusian reasoning alone cannot explain the level of deforestation and forest degradation in Cameroon.