The rate of extinctions in Madagascar is high, owing mainly to catastrophic deforestation — the country has lost ninety per cent of its forests to logging and slash-and-burn agriculture.
Wasser has found that more than eighty-five per cent of poached forest-elephant ivory comes from a specific region where Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, and Central African Republic meet and that, more often than not, it's associated with "major transnational organized-crime syndicates".
In Ethiopia, injera is often cooked by women's coöperatives, in kitchens that may have forty or fifty smoky, inefficient stoves running simultaneously — one reason that the country has lost more than ninety per cent of its forests since the early sixties.
By some estimates, only ten per cent of the original forest cover on Madagascar remains.
The study also demonstrates, using a high-resolution map of global tree cover, that more than seventy per cent of the world's forest now lies within one kilometre of such an edge.
Fifty-two per cent of the mature exotic forest was on slopes >26° (Table 3) yet generated just ~4% of the total mass at a rate of ~9.5 t ha−1.
Two decades ago, just five per cent of the 6.4 million hectare forest (16 million acres) forest was protected.
It did not help that more than eighty per cent of the world's forests are under state control, and that governments tend to regard them as sovereign resources.
He notes that more than eighty per cent of the world's forests are under state control, which seems to me a major factor in illegally harvested and trafficked forestry products.
According to Ecotrust, an Oregon-based conservation group, California, Oregon, and Washington have lost ninety per cent of their combined coastal rain forest, while British Columbia, which originally had twice as much forest area, has lost forty per cent.
"But 85 per cent of the land here is forest, and it is very satisfying when you see these yellow fruit defeating the forest".
