The Congo Basin (formerly Zaire) is the home of most of the tropical rainforests of Africa, although the forest once covered the entire west coast of Africa from Senegal to the Rift Valley. Only a small percentage of the original cover of forest remains in West Africa because of logging and agriculture. The demand for Timber from Central Africa has been steadily growing since the 1990s, especially in Gabon, Cameroon, and the Congos as West African exporters discontinued their operations. Central Africa, therefore, is experiencing a rapid deforestation trend. As well as being a concession for industrial agriculture, large areas of forest are being developed to plant oil palms.West Africa had 193,000 square miles of land around the turn of the century. This area was home to coastal rainforests covering 500,000 square miles. In West Africa, most of the tropical forests are lowland formations that are easily accessible from the coast, so their exploitation, particularly logging, and conversion to agriculture, have greatly diminished them.In West Africa, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, less than 20 percent of moist forests remain, and most of those forests are in a state of degradation. In countries like Nigeria, where human population pressures exert huge pressure on forests, large areas of forests have been lost as a result of commercial logging and agriculture. The impacts of forest losses are still unclear, though erosion has increased in Mali and Niger, and drought incidence has also increased. Rainfall that occurs in these interior countries seems to be influenced by these coastal forests.