The hamburger connection: how Central America's forests become North America's hamburgers

It is ironic that if Central America's forests disappear within the foreseeable future, not only local people will suffer by way of environmental degradation, decline of watershed services, and the like. (Already Costa Rica's hydropower dams are being silted up, and Honduras has undergone undue hurricane damage due to loss of forest cover). Other human communities will suffer, notably North Americans, Central America's rainforests, with their exceptionally rich biotic diversity, contain many genetic resources of great value to modern agriculture, medicine and industry. For example, in 1978 a wild variety of perennial corn was discovered in a forest of southern Mexico. Not only could this new strain enable the corn-growing industry, through cross-breeding, to avoid the season-by-season cost of ploughing and sowing, but the wild germplasm offers resistance to several viruses which attack commercial corn. And according to a botanist from south Carolina, Dr. Monie S. Hudson, who specializes in medicinal applications of phytochemicals, a screening program to evaluate 1500 tree species in Costa Rica's forests has revealed that around 15 percent might have potential as a treatment for cancer. It is clear then that both Central Americans and North Americans are contributing to the "hamburgerization" of the rainforests, and that both will suffer from the loss of them. It is equally clear that both must cooperate if the problem is to be solved; either all will lose together, or all could gain together -a paradigm of interdependency resource relationships within the international community.