The Last Forests of Bangladesh

Bangladesh is amazingly green but it is a forest poor country indeed. According to officially recognized estimates the country’s forest cover has shrunk to merely six percent today from 20% in 1927. Even this estimate about the remaining forests is questionable. The old growth trees have disappeared from he public forests and one can hardly find good patches of natural forest anywhere in Bangladesh except for those in the mangroves. Plantations are not to be considered as forests. This is a miserable situation for the maintenance of ecological stability. The attempts for afforestation with foreign finances have not been much helpful; rather have hastened the process if destruction and have complicates the traditions involving forests and forest dependent people. The government authorities and different groups including the international financial institutions, which play a key role in the forestry sub-sector, blame growing population, poverty, shifting cultivation, fuel wood collection, etc. for the depletion of the forests. This book examines how the people and poverty are wrongly blamed. It is not the people who are intertwined with forests or poverty but unscrupulous exploitation by the State and production-oriented forestry practices that hasten the destruction of forests.