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In the most famous study, Charles Peters of the New York Botanical Garden found that almost every piece of the Amazon rainforests of Peru contained hundreds of valuable species. In 1989, he valued the annual harvest at $650 per hectare – more than twice its value as either timber plantation or cattle pasture.The conclusion was obvious – and a great relief to biologists and conservationists. The forests were worth more to locals intact than if they were cut down. As Peters put it: “without question, the sustainable exploitation of non-wood forest resources represents the most immediate and profitable method for integrating the use and conservation of Amazonian forests.”The findings gave a huge push to the idea of creating “extractive reserves”, areas of rainforest protected from logging and dedicated exclusively to the harvesting of nuts, fruits, rubber, plant medicines or other natural products.But the suspicion has grown that some ecologists have been guilty of wishful thinking. As Godoy points out, few of the studies undertook actual inventories of harvested products. The researchers “focused on what they saw as the potential value of the forests, rather than what was actually taken from the forest.” That sounded like bad economics as well as fanciful thinking. A small amount of a valuable rainforest fruit might fetch a high market price.

But harvesting 10 times as much will more likely just flood the market and send prices tumbling.But meanwhile, Godoy’s own study has painted a very different picture of the fecundity of the forests. His two-year study concentrated on a detailed analysis of the domestic economics of 32 households in two villages, Krausirpe and Yapuwas, both deep in the jungle on the river Patuca in the heart of the Tawahka Anthropological Reserve, home of the Tawahka Indians.”Ours is the first attempt to physically measure the goods that came into the house, whether plants or animals, and to put a value on each,” he says. The products included fruit, fish, wild game, medicinal plants, firewood and construction materials. Where any product was not traded in the village and there was no obvious market price, he says, “we asked how much of a commercial product – salt, for instance – they would be willing to give up in exchange”.They found that the annual harvest from a typical hectare of rainforest round the two villages was worth a measly $20, roughly a twentieth of the value found in Peters’ Amazon study.This is rough news for environmentalists, but hardly surprising, according to Godoy “People in the rainforest are poor. If the forest produced high economic value to these people, they would not be poor.” Honduras is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere, and the Tawahka Indians among its poorest, most isolated, inhabitants.Though prospectors, loggers and cattle barons have encroached round the edges of the Tawahka reserve, the forests close to the two villages remain largely intact But that is unlikely to last, says Godoy.

“Almost any new food staple or form of livestock-raising would induce them to clear the forest. Rural people do this because they are poor and stuck with a nearly worthless asset, not because they lack security of tenure.”For such reasons, Hondurans have removed half the country’s forests in the past 40 years. Godoy’s study suggests that this makes reasonable economic sense for the people on whose land the forests sit. If people want cash, chopping down their forest is the best way to get it.Many environmentalists and even economists blame corruption, international debt, poverty in the cities, globalisation and the international timber trade for the destruction of the rainforests. They argue that if the forest people had full control of their land and the right to manage it without the risk of take-over by land barons and corporations, they would protect it and harvest its riches.Armed with this belief, green-minded entrepreneurs have tried to develop international markets for forest products – Body Shop and Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream are high-profile initiatives of the past decade.In most cases, this is pure “rhetoric”, Godoy says. “We did this research far from roads and market towns, in an area where traditional land-tenure rights still operate There were no invaders It made no difference. The people were poor because the forest was poor.” But the truth is that, for all the effort, the economics of rainforest destruction have barely altered.