ty:
2. the need for peasant farmers to earn a livelihood
3. Brazilian government policies to construct highways, subsidize agriculture, and relocate farmers into the forests
4. the cattle industry's forced manipulation of peasant farmer land rights, and the marginalization of these farmers to the frontier
6. rapid degradation of pastures due to poor soil quality and the costs of reclamation
7. oversupplies of beef and timber leading to price deflation and debt with banks in industrialized nations. Large debt, in turn, exacerbates timber exports.
A growing number of ecologists and economists realize that economic valuation of tropical goods leaves out or "externalizes" too many costs, such as pollution that damages the environment, while failing to "capture" the whole value of environmental goods and services (Costanza et al. 1997a, Dailey et al. 1997). Ecological economists argue that economic decisions need to incorporate, in addition to the market value of tropical forests, the non-market values that people have for the environment.
Non-consumptive use values: uses that are not "extracted" from the environment, such as birdwatching, sunbathing, paying for a documentary or TV show about the environment, photography, tree climbing, among others.
Existence values: non-consumption "appreciation" or moral values, including the intrinsic value of species existence, stewardship, and the value of preserving the environment for future generations. This last category has received considerable attention, and the human welfare benefits provided by the environment are called ecosystem services. There are many functions that ecosystems perform that, if permanently damaged, would cost humans to replace. Table 1 presents global ecosystem services recently identified by a group of ecological economists.
Table 1. Ecosystem services and examples (modified from Costanza et al. 1997b).
Ecosystem service Ecos...