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Free market economy versus intervention of leaders

On principle, with respect to "Use of tropical forests" topic, two types of thinking are opposite:

a) Limitation, that is forbidding the use of a certain type or any type of tropical wood in industrialised countries. The fundamental of this doctrine is the theory that forbidding import results in stopping demand and thus forest clearing would reduce. This is only partially correct, because, on a worldwide scale, it can be neither implemented on large areas nor controlled; on the other hand the countries involved cannot be constrained to this. The disadvantage of this banishments is that for the countries involved, and as a result for their population, a source of income is stopped and through this, the idea of maintaining the environment would be further jeopardized due to the fact that such forests would have a further “reduced value” (“the forest fruits” would not be sold any longer); the key reply: "we must be able to afford environmental protection". I felt this recognition “on my own skin”, when I spent a longer time, for professional reasons, in two of the poorest states of the world, Pakistan and later Indonesia. Whenever people scramble for their bare life, environmental protection is their least concern (if they die, they do not care about their environment anyway).

b) Predispositions of market economy postulate self-adjustment through the market economy forces: if demand for certain goods (teak wood for instance) increases too much, then, further to the lack of raw material a rise in the price would come up and demand is reduced, while on the supply side investments in the production of the highly demanded product are encouraged. Increase in demand and the disappearance of teak wood stocks resulted, at least in Indonesia, in the planting of fresh teak tree plantations, even if young plantations will need many years to reach the maturity necessary for cutting.

Our opinion is that here only a predisposition of the market economy may lead to reaching a target of market equilibrium, even if certain control activities of the government is necessary in the field of natural resources with a long period of economic analysis. Influence of public opinion and of the organisations for environment protection that demand a sustained efficiency of administration is saluted.