One of the unrecognized causes of tropical deforestation in Central America are drug traffickers who purchase swaths of forest and convert the land for cattle ranching in order to launder their money, according to an Oregon State University study reported on in Science Daily.
Cocaine trafficking may account for as much as 30 percent of forest loss in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua during the past 10 years, and 30–60 percent of forest loss occurred in nationally or internationally designated protected areas, the study reports.
"Imagine the cloud of carbon dioxide from all of that burning forest," David Wrathall, a geographer with Oregon State University and a co-author of the study, told Science Daily. "The most explosive change in land use happened in areas where land ownership isn't clear—in forested, remote areas of Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, where the question of who owns the land is murky."
