Different Faces of the Rainforest Business
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
This site has hundreds of fotos of tropical plants
This time we are going to review a site that shows that not all commercial web pages are the same. To begin with, Rain-Tree offeres such a big deal of information about tropical plants, with explanations, drawings and photos that it could be regarded almost as a website about plants or biology. Of course the owners use the site to sell their products, which are pharmaceutical products obtained from the vast variety of tropical plants growing in the rainforests of the earth. However the company shows an ecological approach to making business with the resources of the rainforest. While using the land for cattle or timber harvesting destroys the rainforest, there are other ways of gaining profits from the rainforest: harvesting sustainable resources such as medicinal plants. There is a good question pointed out by the site owners: “How can we in rich developed nations tell poor developing tropical countries that they cannot exploit their resources to service their debts and feed their people when our own economies have been built on the extensive exploitation of our own natural resources?” They give an answer: economical viable alternatives must be provided. Surprisingly the alternative even makes more economic sense: an estimation states that sustainable harvesting of rainforest can result in profits of $2400 per acre per year which contrast dramatically to the poor $400 for cutting timber and $60 for cattle grazing.
The botanical products sold by the company are based on plants used for centuries by the inhabitants of the rainforests.
The company also claims to be protecting these plants form being pateted by a single company, since they put the informtion into the public purview, and what is public kowledge cannot be patented any more. This argument has already been used successfully in the denial of U.S. plant use patents.
This site shows us some good information about sustainable economy. We simpathize with the content of the site, but that is not the reason why we give it a full five stars out of five: The site is content rich, shows different faces of a situation, has lots of well taken photos and is easy to navigate.
