A team led by Patrick Meyfroidt of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium analysed the relationship between reforestation at the national scale and international trade in forest and agricultural products between 1961 and 2007, focusing on six developing countries that underwent a shift from net deforestation to net reforestation during that period: China, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, India and Vietnam.

With the exception of India, in all of these countries, the return of native forests was accompanied by a reduction in timber harvests and the creation of new farmland over the same period, thus creating demand for imported wood and agricultural products. According to the study, this meant that for every 100 hectares of reforested land, the equivalent of 74 hectares of forest products were imported. Taking into account the countries’ exports of agricultural products, the net imbalance came to 22 hectares of land used in other countries. But during the past five years, that figure rose to 52 hectares, so for every hectare of land reforested, half a hectare was used elsewhere.

‘If local forest protection merely shifts forest-conversion pressure to natural forests elsewhere in the world, we won’t achieve a net gain for nature at a global scale,’ said one of the study’s authors, Eric Lambin. ‘However, this study doesn’t imply that the efforts of these countries to protect their forests was useless, but that international trade in wood and agricultural products can decrease the global environmental benefits of national forest-protection policies.’

January 2011