A new study suggests that the drug trade has negative implications to the environment resulting to deforestation in Central America.
Although it has been already discovered that the people involved in the drug industry are clearing patches of the rain forest to grow coca, which is used for the manufacture of cocaine, the paper described a new way by which the drug trade is abusing the environment.
According to the study, drug traffickers will buy patches of land in the forest, bribe local officials, and then proceed in building roads and landing strips in the forest which they use to facilitate the transport of their product. Some also buy lands and convert them into plantations of palm oil which gives them a front for laundering their money.
In 2011, Kendra McSweeney, lead author of the study from the Ohio State University, went to Honduras to study how people relate and interact with their environment. She observed how the indigenous people modified their lifestyle to accommodate the effects of climate change. However, she also discovered the rapid rate of deforestation which was concentrated in the very core of protected areas.
"We wondered who had the money and impunity to do that, and when we looked into it we found that the answer was narco-traffickers," McSweeney said to National Geographic."The flow of drugs through the region resulted in ecological devastation."
Although McSweeney enumerated the other causes of deforestation in the Latin America which include the impacts of building roads and dams, conversion of forest land to farm lands and residential areas, and the worsening case of illegal logging, she also cited that deforestation due to drug trade should be managed immediately.
The researchers identified areas in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua as those who have the highest deforestation rates over the years.
In 2011, the UNESCO had listed the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve in the Honduras as a "World Heritage Danger" due to the alarming rate of deforestation caused by traffickers of narcotics.
The study was published in the Jan. 31 issue of Science.
