crops of the world have been brought 
into cultivation only recently. One ex- 
ample, the oil palm, widely cultivated 
only for the past fifty years, is now 
a multibillion-dollar industry. 
In contrast to potentially useful wild 
organisms, many unknown species are 
potentially harmful. The brown leaf 
hopper, for example, is a small insect 
that caused several billion dollars of 
damage to rice crops in Southeast Asia 
during the past five years and reduced 
millions of people to starvation. A 
member of an insect group comprising 
more than 20,000 known species, 
which can be identified competently 
by only about a dozen people in the 
entire world, this pest was virtually 
unknown until it appeared by the bil- 
lions in the rice fields of Southeast 
Asia three years ago. The pressure 
from pests and diseases in the tropics 
is generally so great that growing sin- 
gle crops in pure stands over any but 
the smallest areas is very difficult. 
Many such obstacles stand in the way 
of creating productive agricultural 
systems or reforestation projects simi- 
lar to those that are common in tem- 
perate regions, and without basic 
knowledge of tropical plants and ani- 
mals we will be unable to understand 
the potentially harmful ones well 
enough to prevent their depredations 
on crops and domestic animals. 
Against this background, the tiny 
effort that is being undertaken to learn 
more about tropical plants and ani- 
mals and the natural communities in 
which they live is embarrassing. 
Worldwide, there are no more than 
an estimated 4,000 scientists primarily 
concerned with studies of this kind; 
the total in the United States amounts 
to some 1,500 individuals. Probably 
no more than 1,500 scientists in the 
world are able to catalog and describe 
tropical organisms or are even com- 
petent to make professional identifi- 
cations of them. The number of un- 
known tropical organisms — five out of 
six have never been seen by any pro- 
fessional student — amounts to a stag- 
gering total of some 2.5 million spe- 
cies, or about twice as many as all 
species described during the past 225 
years. 
An even smaller number of scien- 
tists throughout the world — no more 
than two dozen — are competent to su- 
pervise and undertake large-scale 
studies and experimental modification 
of tropical ecological systems. Of the 
handful of these individuals in the 
United States, no more than three are 
engaged in tropical studies at present. 
Notwithstanding this great lack, the 
ultimate success of every forestry and 
agricultural system being proposed for 
the tropics rests on an understanding 
of the functioning of the undisturbed 
ecological systems that are being re- 
placed. 
Gaining this understanding will cost 
money. Yet in the United States, the 
total expenditure in fiscal year 1979 
for basic tropical biology was no more 
than $20 million. This small sum al- 
most certainly represents more than 
half the total global funding; the tropi- 
cal countries themselves are rarely 
able to divert significant amounts of 
money into research or even devel- 
opment. The collective human effort 
to learn more about tropical plants 
and animals and the associations in 
which they occur is very limited in- 
deed. 
The extremely serious nature of 
these deficiencies can be understood 
properly only when viewed against the 
background of tropical deforestation. 
The lowland tropical forests, which 
a century ago made up an area twice 
the size of Europe, have been reduced 
to about half their former extent. Ev- 
ery week, the remaining tropical low- 
land forest diminishes by an area 
about the size of Delaware, and every 
year, an area about the size of the 
island of Great Britain is removed. 
Such a rate of destruction, if applied 
uniformly around the world, would re- 
sult in the disappearance of all un- 
altered tropical forest in approxi- 
mately thirty years, but of course the 
rate is not evenly distributed. The Na- 
tional Research Council’s Committee 
on Research Priorities in Tropical Bi- 
ology, which published its report in 
June of 1980, estimated that within 
twenty years the only surviving ex- 
tensive tracts of undisturbed tropical 
lowland forest will be those in the 
western Brazilian Amazon region and 
in Zaire in central Africa, and that 
even these will be altered and defor- 
ested during the first ten to twenty 
years of the twenty-first century. 
This process of alteration is essen- 
tially irreversible for several reasons. 
First, it is closely connected with pop- 
ulation growth in tropical countries, 
the great majority of which are grow- 
ing so fast that their populations will 
double within twenty-five years. Since 
between 40 and 50 percent of the 
present population in most tropical 
countries consists of individuals less 
than fifteen years of age, even the 
immediate adoption of consistent and 
sustained population-control policies 
would not produce a stable situation 
until the latter part of the twenty- 
first century. By that time, the world 
would have a population of some 16 
to 18 billion people, or about four 
times the present number. Second, the 
patterns of land use in tropical regions 
are such that only a very small pro- 
portion of the land is used to feed 
the hungry poor. In the United States, 
7 percent of the landowners own 27 
percent of the arable land. In Latin 
America, by contrast, 7 percent of 
the landowners possess 93 percent of 
the arable land, and since most of 
this land is planted with cash crops 
and export crops to earn foreign credit, 
the remaining 7 percent of the land 
must produce sufficient food for the 
vast majority of the people. Interna- 
tional commerce, which guides the ex- 
ploitation of the 93 percent of the 
land controlled by large landowners, 
plays a significant role in structuring 
the economies of tropical countries. 
Poor people, denied access to arable 
land, cause about two-thirds of all de- 
struction and alteration of tropical for- 
est. These forest farmers cut out a 
section of forest and grow a crop or 
two before the soil deteriorates to the 
point where cultivation is no longer 
feasible. A variety of other factors 
are responsible for the remaining de- 
struction of tropical forests. In South- 
east Asia, the wholesale exploitation 
of forests for timber by foreign-owned 
corporations, which make little more 
than a gesture toward the replacement 
of the forests, is the major factor. In 
Latin America, the relentless effort 
to produce cheap beef for the United 
States and other developed countries 
is causing the disappearance of vast 
areas of forest. Ironically, while more 
than a quarter of all the forests in 
Central American countries have been 
destroyed in the past twenty years to 
produce beef for the American mar- 
ket, the average consumption of beef 
in those countries has declined steadily 
during the same period. 
When they learn that tropical for- 
ests are rapidly disappearing, many 
people accept the destruction as war- 
ranted since they believe it will lead 
to the implementation of productive 
forms of agriculture that will help feed 
the hungry people of the world — much 
as the clearing of the forests in Europe 
and North America made possible the 
wide spread of productive agricultural 
systems in these regions over the cen- 
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