The declaration includes a summary of the basic causes of deforestation and this article is based on that summary. The Emergency Call to Action was not heeded and a General Assembly was not held. To confront the true causes of deforestation would have required the UN and its members to question their very foundations, and they have not yet had the courage. Instead, the supposed solutions offered have been an expression of the value system which created the problem in the first place. Pressure from Human Settlement and Its Causes Many development institutions and politicians regard population pressure as the major factor causing rainforest destruction.
Nobody can deny the serious global problem of population growth.
However, the belief that this is the main cause of rainforest loss is used by many governments and businesses to imply that there is little or nothing they can do about the problem of rainforest destruction. An examination of forest destruction on a regional basis reveals that this is not so. In fact it is large companies and the inequities of international trade which are the root causes of rainforest destruction. For instance, millions of hectares of primary rainforests are being destroyed in South East Asia by logging, and the driving force in this industry is not the local population but international demand for timber. Because landless people will follow logging roads into primary rainforest areas, it is the logging industry which is the main immediate factor responsible for colonisation of rainforest.