Introduction

Merely understanding the biology of eastern Africa's closed forests is not sufficient if we wish to maintain the resource as a functional natural community for posterity. Conservation needs action: it needs management inputs into both the resource itself and the human populations who depend on the resources for their livelihood and in so doing often degrade the resource. There is still a need for biology, however, especially for a resource as complex as the tropical forests, where even the identification of the component species remains problematical.

We are witnessing the loss of forests and loss of forest species all over the tropics; eastern Africa is no exception, but here we have had only a small and fragmented resource base of forest to start with. These forests are important for water catchment and timber, and their area is coveted for agricultural development. Pressures on the forest land are growing and are often incompatible. It is a sad paradox that now, in the 1990s, we often know how we could achieve conservation and how we can share the ‘cake’, but we often lack the political and financial will to do so.

This chapter traces the history of land use in the forest areas in eastern Africa, and examines the causes of incompatibility between land usages, and some theoretical and practical implications for conservation.