"I can only expect destruction for my family because I am provoking it with my own hands.

"This is what happens when the peasant doesn't receive help … - he looks for the obvious way out, which is to farm the mountain slopes and cut down the mountain vegetation. Otherwise …. I know what I am doing - as a person I know. I am destroying the land."

-Honduran Peasant, 1990, Quoted by Susan Stonich in Tropical Deforestation (Methods and Cases in Conservation Science), Leslie Sponsel, ed.

 
The Problem

A Global Problem with Individual Consequences

Deforestation is a problem of growing significance all over the world. It is especially acute in tropical countries. All of us are affected by this problem, but no one more than the rural poor who make their living in and around the forest.

There are nearly a half-a-billion subsistence farmers worldwide. Constantly fighting starvation and utterly dependent on their environment for survival, they are often trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and deforestation.

Threatened by land which no longer produces, rains that no longer come, and springs which are dry, they clear the forest for agriculture or sell charcoal to survive, further degrading their land.

This cycle can be broken!

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