text: But for most environmentalists currently writing on the subject, the story of man's impact on the rainforest is nothing but one of exploitation. Tucker tells of how in SE Asia, the extraction of spices, woods and other products were done for 300 years without hurting the forest ecosystem. And in Africa, only small amounts of hardwood and oil palm nuts were harvested. But in the America's there was a different fate. "Some New World forests were entirely eliminated by plantation agriculture before the French Revolution transformed Europe's colonial regimes. The agent was sugar, the first widespread tropical monocrop .The Portuguese, taking control of coastal Brazil after 1530, leveled a long forest belt, replacing it with sugar plantations." These sugar plantations were later moved to Caribbean islands. And besides sugar, hardwood timber was the other early-modern rainforest export.