How can people live in the rainforest if they cannot sell wood?
For the traditional forest inhabitants, the forest provides all that they need. Indigenous forest dwellers, rubber tappers and many other groups of local people obtain many secondary products from the forest. Examples include fruit, roots, palm-hearts, sago, nuts, wild honey, meat and fish, resins, gums, rubber and medicines. In contrast to tropical wood, these products are usually traded locally and do not appear in export statistics. It leads to an inaccurate picture of the local economy. Various scientific studies have shown that the sustainable use of secondary products is economically more viable than the one-sided exploitation of trees for export as timber. Wood is therefore not the most important raw material from the rainforest! Are poor countries not dependent on the export of tropical wood for income? Although countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Guinea have sacrificed their forests for the export of wood, they are still p
