Increasing food production at the expense of tropical forests

Abstract

An attempt is made to estimate to what extent it is possible to increase food production by conversion of forest land to agricultural land. To accomplish this two different approaches have been explored. The first one represents the possibility of developing a comprehensive model capable of taking into account the various processes influencing the food production. It is judged that this approach cannot provide a realistic result due to insufficient knowledge of the processes involved, and lack of reliable data. Instead a simple, heuristic method has been applied. The main sources of information used include data representing the soil of the deforested land, the decline of the productivity of the land gained, and the length of time it can be used for agricultural production. Although this method also has its obvious limitations, there are reasons to believe it permits certain conclusions can be safely drawn: (a) even if each year the area of agricultural land is increased by a given amount through removal of forest, there will be no gain of the agricultural production after a few years; and (b) to achieve a constant annual increase of the food production will require that each year the area of forest removal is increased.