Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

practice (Sillitoe 1998: 228-9). Throughout the 1990’s, a far more effective driving
force was an interest in the direct economic potential of extractive industries, and
the potential this has to provide an economic rationale for the conservation of
forests. It is nowadays widely considered that the sustainable harvesting of non-
timber forest products such as fruits and nuts (Clement 1993) or palm products
(Kahn 1993) can form part of a multi-faceted production system which reconciles
use of the forest as an economic resource with the long-term maintenance of
biodiversity and ecological functions (Lescure and Pinton 1993; Clement 1993: 140).
The economic importance of extractivism is already vast - it was estimated in 1982
to employ 1.5 million people in the Brazilian Amazon alone, producing an annual
income of around 100 million dollars (Anderson and Ioris 1992: 178).
To give one local example, the island of Combu in the Guamá river near Belém
supports over 600 people, at a population density of 43 per km 2 , 92 of whom rely on
extractive industries for the majority of their income (Anderson and Ioris 1992: 184-
5). Calculations of the potential market value of products that may be harvested on
an ongoing basis from particular forests in Amazonia suggest that the economic basis
for extractive industries may exist over substantial areas (Peters et al. 1989; Peters
1992). The economic viability of extractivism compared to alternative land uses -
specifically permanent agriculture and livestock raising - has been investigated by
Susanna Hecht. She found that, although the alternatives were more lucrative over a
single short-term cycle of 10-15 years, if the cost of land degradation was
incorporated into her models extractivism was the only economically viable option. In
other words, the potential for sustainable practice makes extractivism a more
economically sound long-term management option than the alternatives (Hecht
1992). A historical study of the dynamics of extractive economies has shown that its
sustainable operation can not be assumed, and in particular depends on the continued
provision of economic benefits as well as the maintenance of harvests within
sustainable limits (Homma 1992). Trends in marketing extracted products in first
world countries as a form of environmentally and socially responsible consumerism
have also been heavily criticised, both on the grounds of the ideological contradiction
and questions as to whether the type of relationships with corporate interests that
are involved are likely to be of long-term benefit to producers (Corry 1993). These
reservations notwithstanding, extractivism has come to occupy a central position in
mainstream discourse on the reconciliation of economical, social and conservationalist
needs. Several cases exist where the practice of extractivism appears to be fulfilling