From any close look at the major demands on western water resources emerges a sense of the inevitability of conflict. Evidence of pressure on water is everywhere. Most streams and rivers in the West have been fully appropriated. Salinity and toxic elements threaten traditional agricultural practices and impose high costs on subsequent water users. Groundwater tributary to a watercourse cannot usually be tapped unless equivalent surface flow rights are retired, and nontributary groundwater is being mined at high rates. In fact, use exceeds average streamflow in nearly every western subregion, and the deficits are being offset with groundwater and water imported from adjoining basins. (See Figure 9.1.)

Several major southwestern cities, including Tucson, are now mining groundwater aquifers to meet everyday demand. Reliable yields from these sources are falling, and economic exhaustion of the resource will soon be approached. Other cities, such as Los Angeles, face a reduction in long-held supplies as upstream states claim their compact-apportioned shares of Colorado River water. As cities attempt to increase supplies to meet growing demands, instream flows may be diminished and water use in other offstream sectors may be threatened politically, if not legally. Conflicts over water supplies and water-quality degradation are not limited to a particular state; they thrive in every state in the West and even extend across state borders.

Although the focus in this volume is on water demand in the municipal and agricultural sectors, overall competition for western water has been growing as strong demands emerge in other sectors as well.

For many years China has suffered from an acute shortage of forest resources. According to the most recent data, based on a nationwide inventory completed in 1981, China has 115,277,000 hectares of forested land. This ranks China sixth in the world in total forest area, but in relation to China's large surface area and enormous population the resource is small. Only 12 percent of the country's surface area is forested, barely half the global average of 22 percent. China has only 0.12 hectares of forested land per capita, just 18.5 percent of the worldwide average of 0.65 hectares. Table 5.1 shows that timber inventories and reserves are equally scarce. China has 10.26 billion cubic meters of reserves (only 9.03 billion if marginal stands are excluded), an average of only 10 cubic meters per capita, or 15 percent of the global average (Table 5.1).

China's paucity of forest resources has hampered the country's economic progress, forcing industry to use substitutes or simply to do without. The country's paper and paperboard production, for example, falls well short of demand despite rising output and suffers from poor quality because three-quarters of domestic output is not based on wood pulp. Industry is subject to stringent guidelines, codified and strengthened in 1983, to minimize wood used in construction, public utilities, transportation, mining, furniture manufacturing, packaging, and other sectors, in favor of brick, concrete, plastics, and other substitutes (Regulations for Economic and Rational Application 1983).

One response to the shortage of forest products has been an increase in imports to over 9 million cubic meters a year in 1985 (Table 5.2).

Background

Water management issues have fundamentally shaped the laws, political and social institutions, economy, and culture of the residents of the Denver area since its beginnings. Denver was founded where two streams meet in the semiarid South Platte valley and has since spread outward to occupy the juncture between the water-scarce High Plains to the east and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains to the west.

Since permanent settlement began in 1859, the successive waves of occupants – miners, irrigation farmers, and later residents of a complex urban service and trade center – have fought to conquer and shape the natural environment to their needs. Land, water, and minerals have been taken where they could be found and exploited to their full, and new resources sought in more distant searches. The values of this society have been those of achievement through aggressive struggle to create and mold an improved environment that compensated for the inadequate environment that nature provided. The society has grown and flourished under an entrenched system of law, custom, and institutional culture that was formed by, and in turn protects, traditional values.

These values are now being challenged by continued growth. Many people now recognize that the growth that has sustained economic vitality is increasingly costly to support because the resources that fuel growth are scarcer and more distant. Another challenge is an awareness that growth itself reduces amenities of life and fouls the environment.

As dissatisfaction intensifies over the conditions of life in the Denver area, an area still considered attractive although no longer ideal, the values that have sustained growth and prosperity are increasingly attacked.

Background

The Colorado River is the major surface water resource of the Southwest. In spite of John Wesley Powell's forecast that the region would never be useful or inhabited, the river basin has been fought over and romanticized more than any western river. Certainly, it has been the subject of more writing – from geomorphology to politics – than any other western river. Nadeau (1950) wrote of the Owens Valley controversy and of the heroic attempts to conquer the Lower Colorado River. Terrell (1965) described in detail the political battle between Arizona and California over the waters of the Lower Basin, and Fradkin (1968) touchingly described the great changes in the river that have come about through human attempts to control and harness its forces. Throughout this history, the influence of the financial power and the concentration of political power on water issues have dominated the policy scene, and since passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902, the federal government through the Bureau of Reclamation has been the agent of project construction and water supply provision.

The Upper Basin has grown more slowly than the Lower Basin – a typical pattern for development for river basins – generally owing to the superior climate, soils, and accessibility of the Lower Basin. Because the Colorado River's waters are produced primarily by snowmelt in the mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, this uneven growth pattern has created a pattern of mutual fears between Upper and Lower basins, the former fearing that the latter would establish title through early use, the latter fearing the former might eventually develop to a point at which it would be using much of the river's water.

The conflicts and control of water in California have been the source of political careers, personal fortunes, and Hollywood movies. Water has characteristics of both public and private property. Over the past century, water management and development have shifted from small local institutions to predominately large public agencies. The impetus for changing institutions came from physical, economic, and technical shifts; the implementation was manifest political power.

This chapter presents a brief overview of the physical and economic characteristics of California's Central Valley, followed by a historical overview of economic development in the valley, including water law and the major actors in the development and management of water. Emerging problems in the Central Valley water industry are then presented, and the policy solutions to these problems are developed. These conclusions lead to the prediction that California's water institutions are about to change substantially again.

Physical and economic setting

Hydrologically, the Central Valley is divided into three basins, the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Tulare Lake, based on the drainage areas of rivers and streams. In their unimpaired state, all Central Valley rivers drained to the ocean through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay. Owing to reservoir and aqueduct construction, the Tulare Lake Basin is closed, with outflows occurring only in extremely wet years.

Interbasin transfers have concentrated on moving water from the northern half of the state, which receives 75 percent of the precipitation, to the southern half, which receives only 25 percent but contains two thirds of the population.

In the continental United States, the daily renewable supply of water totals about 1,400 billion gallons – 14 times what U. S. citizens consume per day. But national averages mask a central fact of American life: much of the western half of the country is arid or semiarid. Its rich greens would soon bleach to desert colors but for water pumped from aquifers or diverted from rivers by highly inventive, though sometimes extraordinarily expensive, means.

Geography may be destiny. Certainly, U.S. water riches are unevenly distributed. In the arid and semiarid West, annual water consumption averages 44 percent of renewable supplies. Everywhere else in the country, the average is 4 percent. This difference explains why rapid population and economic growth exerts particularly intense pressures in the West, why irrigation has become the lifeblood of western agriculture, and why water law and water allocation institutions are now being rattled to their foundations by the test of the times.

The American West is now living on borrowed water. Even discounting farfetched schemes to import water into the region from Canada, the West is using water faster than nature can replenish it. The borrowers are this generation, and the lenders the next.

Water-short or not, the West is still the place to go. Migration from other regions of the country and immigration from Mexico and other points south combine with rapid indigenous growth to make the western Sun Belt one of the fastest-growing regions in the United States.

History of forest use

History of deforestation

At the start of the century, the Philippine archipelago was covered with rich dipterocarp forests. Today, forests have disappeared in many places, and those that remain are concentrated on a few islands: Mindanao, Palawan, Samar, and pockets of eastern Luzon. In 1982, the government reported that 16.6 million hectares, or 55 percent of the country's land area, were forest lands, of which 11.2 million hectares were forested. About 9 percent of the country, or 2.7 million hectares, was said to be virgin forests. Yet the rate at which virgin forests declined is astounding. From 1971 to 1980, they decreased by 1.7 million hectares, with 1.1 million converted permanently to nonforest uses (Reyes 1983). Table 4.1 summarizes the status of the forest area of the Philippines.

However, these government statistics have been disputed in recent years. One study (Revilla 1984), using Landsat photos, estimated forested lands at only 8.9 million hectares, 0.6 million hectares of them in alienable and disposable lands. In another study (Revilla 1984) Landsat photos for 1976 suggested that only about 8.5 to 9 million hectares of forest lands were forested in 1976, and that the total had been reduced to 7.8 to 8.3 million hectares by 1983. This study estimated there were 2 to 2.5 million fewer hectares of virgin forest than the government's figure of 2.7 million hectares. These discrepancies may be corrected with the completion of the second national forest inventory, begun in 1981. Meanwhile, the lower figures seem more credible.

Deforestation in the Philippines began to accelerate in the post-independence era following the Second World War.

Principal findings

Some low-income nations are confronting a shortage of wood; the world is not. The world is, however, facing a decline of natural tropical forests. Even as policy-makers begin to understand the value of natural tropical forests, they are rapidly shrinking and deteriorating. The studies underlying this volume were neither intended nor needed to verify these problems. Other scientists have clearly established the extent of forest decline and likely economic, social, and environmental consequences (Brown etal. 1985; Eckholm 1976; Fearnside 1982; Grainger 1980; Lanly 1982; Myers 1980, 1984, 1985; Spears 1979).

Many of these and other studies (Allen and Barnes 1985; Bunker 1980; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1981; Plumwood and Routley 1982; Tucker and Richards 1983) have also established the principal causes of deforestation. They have identified three major outgrowths of population growth and rural poverty – shifting cultivation, agricultural conversion, and fuelwood gathering – as threats to natural forests in the Third World, along with the impacts of large development projects. Virtually all previous studies have also focussed upon commercial exploitation, including logging and land-clearing for ranches, as major sources of the problem.

The studies contained in this volume support these findings. In addition, the authors have identified government policies that have significantly added to and exacerbated other pressures leading to wasteful use of natural forest resources including those owned by governments themselves. We emphasize the policy dimension, because changes in policy can substantially reduce resource wastage. Our emphasis on wasteful use in the economic sense does not ignore or minimize the importance of noneconomic objectives underlying forest policies.

All beginning students learn that economics is about the efficient allocation of scarce resources. In that spirit, Robert Repetto, Malcolm Gillis, and the other contributors to this volume have shown that good economics can help stem the loss of the world's disappearing forest resources. Reversing the forces of tropical deforestation in the closing years of this century is of paramount importance. Rapid population growth, unemployment, and concentrated agricultural landholdings are fueling the drive to clear forested land for agriculture. Demands on the world's forests for timber, industrial raw materials, and fuel are growing. Even as these pressures mount, scientists are documenting with greater precision the roles that forests play in the control of erosion and floods, in the hydrological cycle, and in the survival of perhaps half of the planet's species.

This volume convincingly demonstrates that, on balance, government policies affecting the forest sector aggravate rather than counteract this pressure. Inappropriate tax and trade policies, distorted investment incentives, and shortsighted development priorities contribute to alarming waste of forest resources, and result in heavy economic and fiscal losses as well. In all ten countries covered by the studies underlying this book, such policies contribute to uneconomic and ecologically damaging exploitation.

Thus, Public Policies and the Misuse of Forest Resources shows how conflicts of interest between conservationists and developers are often more apparent than real. Indeed, an important message of this volume is that more reasonable policies can save both natural and financial resources. The policy changes that Gillis and Repetto outline in the closing chapter give specific content to the idea of sustainable development of forest resources.

Water development in the American West has been shaped by the region's geography, legal and institutional arrangements, urban expansion, and the spread of irrigated agriculture.

Geography

From the grasslands of west Texas to the deserts of Arizona, the southwest quadrant of the United States is the most arid part of the country. The southern Great Plains states with their vast farmlands and grazing lands are semiarid and relatively flat. To the west, the Rocky Mountains and other ranges in Colorado and New Mexico rise out of the plains to form the massive peaks of the Continental Divide. These mountains shelter some well-watered valleys before giving way to arid basins and deserts in Nevada, Utah, and southern California. Terrain and local climate thus vary considerably throughout the arid and semiarid West. Of the 1.9 billion acres of land in the continental United States, almost half receive less than 20 inches of precipitation per year (Council on Environmental Quality, 1980). (See Figure 1.1.) Water supplies in this arid and semiarid region are both limited and variable. Precipitation in the form of rainfall and snowfall is unevenly distributed across and within the western states. For example, average rainfall in the mountainous area surrounding Flagstaff, Arizona, measures over 20 inches per year. But in central and southern Arizona, where most of the people live and most of the agricultural areas are located, average rainfall ranges from only 7 inches (in Phoenix) to 11 inches (in Tucson) per year (Ruffner and Bair, 1981).

Equally as important as the quantity of rainfall for western water users is the natural variation in supplies from season to season, year to year, and even decade to decade.

The South Coast Basin of southern California includes the second largest urban area in the United States as well as the two largest cities in California. In addition to the major centers of Los Angeles and San Diego, there are numerous other urban and suburban communities. The 1980 population of the entire region was 12.01 million, compared with a prewar (1940) total of only 2.9 million. Over the past 40 years, the dramatic growth in population, which has averaged 10 percent annually, has been fueled by a variety of factors, including a favorable climate and the rise of defense and aerospace-related industry. This growth was achieved despite the severe limitations of local water supplies.

Mean annual precipitation in the region averages only 14 inches. Over the period of record, annual precipitation has been quite variable, ranging between 5 and 38 inches annually. In addition, the area has a typically Mediterranean climate in which rainfall occurs predominantly between November and April. As a consequence, there exists not only a dearth of locally generated water supplies but an incongruity between the winter period, when those supplies are more readily available, and the summer period, when water demands are at a peak.

The modern history of the region has been characterized by the development of supplemental water supplies and the storage facilities necessary to regulate water flows so as to redress the natural imbalance between periods of peak supply and peak demands. The physical manifestations of this development include three major aqueducts that, with their associated storage facilities, permit the South Coast Basin to import water from the Colorado River, the Central Valley of California, and the Owens Valley to the northeast.

There can be no meaningful discussion of the implications of “Malaysian” policies impinging upon Malaysia's natural forest estate. Subnational governments in Malaysia possess great autonomy; in forestry policy autonomy has been defined with particular clarity. We may, however, speak of Sabah policies, Sarawak policies, and to a very limited extent, Peninsular Malaysian policies affecting the forest sector.

Accordingly, this chapter is divided into five distinct sections. The first sketches the salient features of forest endowments, forest utilization, and forest policies in Malaysia as a whole. The second section focuses upon forest exploitation and public policies in the state of Sabah, where timber harvest and deforestation rates have been the most rapid in recent years. The third section examines forest issues and forest policies in Sarawak state, and the fourth deals with these questions in the 12 states of Peninsular Malaysia. The final section focuses upon the implications of national-level non-forestry policies on deforestation in all three regions.

Malaysia: east and west

Malaysia is composed of three distinct and geographically separate regions: Peninsular Malaysia, containing 12 states, and the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak in the northern portion of the island of Borneo. Peninsular Malaysia, also known as West Malaysia, contains 40 percent of the nation's total land area (Table 3.1), but 81 percent of the population, 14.9 million people in 1983. Malaysia is a relatively wealthy country: 1985 GNP per capita, at US $2,000, was nearly four times that of neighboring Indonesia (World Bank 1987: 202).

Most of the factors responsible for deforestation in Indonesia since 1950 have also been operative in Malaysia: poverty, institutions, and public policies.

This chapter examines the role of public policy in deforestation in each of four West African countries: Liberia, Cote d'lvoire (hereafter, Ivory Coast), Ghana, and Gabon. We provide an overview of forest resources, deforestation, and international trade in tropical hardwoods for the entire region, and on a country-by-country basis. Patterns of property rights and foreign investment in each nation are addressed, as well as the national benefits these countries have derived from forest utilization and government capture of timber rents. We then focus upon reforestation and forest concessions policies, respectively, and examine the impact of forestbased industrialization policies. Finally, the impact of non-forestry policies on tropical forest utilization in each of the four nations is considered.

Overview

By most estimates, the rate of decline in the area of productive closed forest in West Africa has been the highest in the world since 1975, some 3.7 times the average rate for all tropical countries (Lanly and Clement 1979: 10–21). The four West African nations studied in this chapter include the Ivory Coast, with the highest rate of annual deforestation yet observed anywhere, Liberia and Ghana, in which only shreds of natural forest remain, and Gabon, where deforestation has been slow but will likely accelerate sharply before the end of the century, with the completion of the Trans-Gabon Railway.

In 1984, these four countries together accounted for nearly all of Africa's timber exports (Ivory Coast shipped 60 percent of this) but only 9.3 percent of world exports of tropical hardwood forest products (World Bank 1986: 8).