ABSTRACT
All types of forests throughout the world face various threats of destruction. Forests in the tropics, in particular, are disappearing at alarmingly high rates. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN in 1990 estimated that a total of 1,700 million ha of tropical forests remain worldwide, while the annual deforestation rate since 1980 has been 17 million ha, or 50 per cent higher than the previous estimate of 11.3 million ha. 1 These figures do not include forest degradation, which is estimated to be an additional 4.3 million ha of forests each year.
