“At the source of deforestation and pandemics, there is a dramatic inability to foresee the misery of part of the world population”

Tribune. Certainly, the forests are in bad shape. A recent study conducted by the Joint Research Center (JRC), published in the journal Science Advances on March 5, revealed damning data. Tropical rainforests have shrunk by 220 million hectares in the last thirty years, and deforestation in the intertropical zone has been underestimated by around 30% on the African continent alone. Tropical rainforests, which are home to half of all known plant and animal species, cover less than 10% of the land area. The ecological services provided by these forests vanish with them.

Yet the root causes of global deforestation are still not seen in the face. However, tropical forests are disappearing mainly under the iron and fire of farmers in search of land. Rural precariousness and land tenure insecurity are the primary origins of this global phenomenon. In Brazil, it has long been a question of giving landless peasants land without peasants, by converting forests into agricultural land.

In Africa, peasants in a situation of land deprivation, deprived of any title to property, have no other choice but to clear the land in order to have a piece of land. The precariousness of the rural populations, doomed in addition to having to extract the wood for cooking or firewood on which their survival depends from woodlands, represents the original link in this devastating chain.

The plague arises from rural insalubrity

However, it is this same rural precariousness that is found at the source of zoonoses. In fact, it is the result, in large part, of the epidemics likely to spread on a global scale. We know that since 1347, the plague is born and reborn from rural insalubrity. The Ebola virus was spread as a result of the consumption of meat taken from sick animals by poachers in a survival situation. The same is probably true of the AIDS virus, which appeared in Cameroon at the beginning of the 20th century.e century thanks to the consumption of infected chimpanzees.

Lassa fever itself spreads to the poorest rural households. Zoonoses come from bringing infected animals into contact with populations suffering from undernutrition and penalized by already poor health. They are therefore not the direct product of deforestation, as is sometimes claimed. If there is a link between the latter and zoonoses, it is that of their common origin.

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