The Causes of Deforestation and Loss of Genetic Resources in Bangladesh

Almost all the people, particularly the rural people are directly dependent on the continued productivity of natural resources, like water, soils, forests and fisheries. But the overuse by the extremely high population pressures has degraded the natural resources into severe widespread deforestation. The degradation of natural resources, particularly the plant resources has been a great concern for socio-economic and sustainable development of the country. The Forests in Bangladesh have been depleted and degraded in volume, area, and quantity, thus requiring urgent forest protection by identifying the causes of forest loss. There are so many causes of deforestation and loss of genetic resources such as; the timber industry, which, legal or not, are cutting too many trees; indigenous forest dwellers, having their own types of problems; migrants, who, because of problems in their places of origin, have decided to move to the forests and the government through its Forest Department which is not able or willing to implement suitable policies to regulate the cutting trees and to prevent illegal cutting. Because it is a time consuming task to mitigate the first and second sets of factors, we recommend involving forest dwellers in forestry practices as much as possible and taking necessary steps to alleviate the third and fourth sets and thereby reduce the rate of forest depletion. Accordingly, a number of strategies that should be adopted to halt the loss of remaining forest cover are discussed.