Decline of Indigenous Crop Diversity in Colonial and Postcolonial Rwanda
Figure 3
(a) Pasture, farm, and forest land cover change over eighteen years (1970 to 1988). (b) Evolution of human pressure on cultivable land over the last 50 years. Fallow and pasture land cover had shrunk to 60% and 40% by 1986 from their respective area coverage of 200,000 ha and 487,884 ha in 1970 (a). During the same period, cultivated land cover had expanded to 156% while communal forests had more than tripled their area coverage. By year 2010 pressure on cultivable land had reached 4-fold the 1960 estimated human density of 2.3 persons per cultivable hectare (b). Unless otherwise indicated, the data used for the above charts were adapted from May (1995).
