Rainforestation farming: option for rural development and biodiversity conservation in the humid tropics of Southeast Asia

On a global perspective, the achipelago of tropical Southeast Asia is one of the richest concerning biodiversity. Unfortunately the unique fauna and flora are under a steadily increasing threat by land use systems like ecologically-unsafe logging practices, expansion of monoculture plantations, shifting cultivation and increasing demand of land due to population pressure. Many areas that have been cultivated traditionally for centuries are becoming degraded agricultural and biological “green deserts” and need to be classified as highly critical land. Rural proverty, greed and gross neglect of basic ecological principles have reduced the former rainforest areas to sometimes mere forest patches of no ecological function anymore. It is therefore necessary to either reforest or enrich degraded formely primary forest areas on most of the islands throughout Southeast Asia and beyond that geographical area. Under the assumption that a farming system in the humid tropics becomes increasingly more sustainable the nearer it is in its species composition and physical structure to the local rainforest ecosystem, a technology of sustainable development was developed called “Rainforestation Farming” where a long-term increase in sustainable income for the local farmers was combined with rehabilitation efforts for its biodiversity. In this system local trees play a key-function as they do in any naturally sound environment. With this book the laudable approach was undertaken to compile all the presently available knowledge about the most important trees for a “Rainforestation Farming System”. It includes hardwood species, fruit trees and pioneer species characterized by fast growth needed to provide the necessary shade, demanded by the majority of hardwood species usually found in the Dipterocarpaceae-dominated rainforests of tropical Southeast Asia. These highly valuable tropical timber trees function as a long-term sustainable income base if grown in successional stages together with pioneer tree species and fruit trees. The author, who is an internationally known tropical forest ecologist, is to be congratulated for this exceptional book and it can be expected that the accumulated knowledge will not only support the rehabilitation efforts on the Visayas, but in all areas where vast landscapes of former tropical rainforest in Southeast Asia are presently nothing else than “grass grown deserts”.