Foreword

Summary

Management problems of water-source areas in developing countries show, within my experience, a characteristic pattern. For familiar ecological reasons, streamflow from forested hills supports the economic development of populations of the valleys and plains below. The protection of water source areas is therefore accepted, in principle, as necessary to national development. Such protection of remote areas is difficult to fund and to staff. The rapid growth of tropical populations has, however, resulted in large-scale invasion and destruction of upper-watershed forests by subsistence cultivators and graziers. Deterioration of streamflow regulation has become an all-too-familiar result, with regular flow replaced by flood flows and dwindling dry-season supply.

Authority resides in cities, but administration strong enough to protect these watershed forests must be resident in the hills. For the administrator, a posting to the remote hills is effectively a banishment to a life far from schools and other amenities as well as from opportunities for recognition and promotion. Thus although Forest Departments maintain their protective patrols by devoted staff, they are, in many countries, inadequately supported by the administration of the law.

Technical reports by hydrologists and land-use specialists, after making systematic surveys paid for by governments, have spelled out the critical importance of watershed protection, but the necessary following action has been neglected in at least a score of countries that I have been privileged to study.