Eighty Percent of Farmland Carved Out of Forests in Tropics, Study Says

More than 80 percent of the agricultural land created in the developing world between 1980 and 2000 came from cutting down tropical forests, a continuing trend that has serious implications for biodiversity loss and global warming, according to a study by Stanford University researchers. Analyzing Landsat satellite data, the researchers determined that roughly half a million square miles of new farmland — an area roughly the size of Alaska — came into being in tropical regions during the 20-year period. Roughly 55 percent of the felled tropical forests were intact forests and 28 percent were forests that had experienced some degradation, such as small-scale farming and logging. Lead researcher Holly Gibbs said the destruction of so much tropical forest has major implications for climate change, since every million acres that is cut releases the same amount of carbon as 40 million cars. Gibbs and her colleagues, reporting in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said that population growth in the next half-century could mean a doubling of land needed for agriculture, likely leading to the loss of millions more acres of tropical forest. But Gibbs highlighted one encouraging sign, which is that the main drivers of forest destruction now are not small farmers but big agribusiness, which is more susceptible to pressure campaigns from environmental groups and consumers.