Sub Saharan Africa Essay

Deforestation Issues in Sub-Saharan Africa

Africa provides one of the most highly destructive environmental issues throughout the whole world. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa has been known to have major impacts with the largest amounts of deforestation, the loss of forests from cutting down too many trees and not re-planting them back. According to the World Resource Institute, Washington DC stated, “More than 80 percent of the earth's natural forests have already been destroyed at a rate of about 40 million hectares per year. Up to 90 percent of West Africa's coastal rain forests have disappeared since 1900. Loss of habitats is among the obvious consequences of deforestation` (seventy percent of the Earth's biodiversity is present in forests).

In fact, this caused a lot of suffering because the forest has been strip-logged, burnt and cultivated, which has altered rain-fall patterns. Therefore, poor soil was left for the people to plant on after the damage have been done. In addition, we know that thick forest protects soil from rain or wind which would otherwise cause massive amounts of erosion. Although some land appears full of growth a few years after it was damaged, but most soils that support the new vegetation are highly unproductive. Also, note that if forests are cleared for agriculture, grazing, or logging, there is no guarantee that the trees can grow back on the impoverished soil. In fact, it takes decades for the soil and vegetation to recover from this destruction, and in the meantime people will not have land to hunt or to grow food on, and this leads to poverty and hunger. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Africa is suffering deforestation at the twice the world rate. Some authors noted that deforestation has already wiped out roughly 85-90 % of original forests in West Africa (Terminski). Again, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 239 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were hungry and undernourished in 2010 due to the harmful economic systems, conflict, environmental factors such as disforestation, drought and climate change, and population growth (“World Hunger

In fact, this method is common in Africa because farmers do not see the benefits of ecologically sound farming, and make more immediate profit from slash and burn farming. African farmers usually look at the short-term profits of slash and burn farming, but do not realize that long run, slash and burn takes more work to complete, and results in less profit over time. In order to solve this problem the farmers need to be educated on the methods and benefits of ecologically farming. According to Mike Hands, “The only truly sustainable system to emerge from our years of scientific research into slash and burn is alley cropping using nitrogen-fixing tree species from the genus Inga. In essence this system has the ability to recreate a version of the conditions found on the rainforest floor, or, in other words, the conditions supporting plant growth in one of the world’s most productive natural systems… in this system, the trees are planted as seedlings in a series of hedgerows forming alleys which run along the contours of the terrain. The Inga leaves quickly create a thick layer of tough mulch on the soil surface. Initially the Inga is allowed to completely dominate the site in order to recapture it by shading out the weeds and grasses – a process usually requiring 1½ to 2 years. Over this time the Inga also restores and rebuilds the soil, fixing nitrogen and recycling phosphorus” (Sitler). In addition, the