To chop or not to chop? That is the question?

I would farm the rain forest and produce and market rain forest crops.

If you cut down the rainforest and farmed the land, it may provide benefit for the local economy. It would become a prosperous area, and people would move into the area. It would soon become overcrowded, and resources would once again be strained. Once again, the answer would be seen as cutting down more forest for more farming, and eventually a city. In a short space of time, there would be very little forest left.

I think the better option would be to leave it standing, and develop an economy that relied on tourism. If it was properly marketed and the government put more money into security for the area, tourists would come to see the rainforest and their money would swell the economy without any environmental detriment.

Rain forest soil is (counter intuitively) very low in nutrients and makes for very poor farmland, which is why slash-and-burn is the predominant method of farming in those areas. The forest is cleared, the area is burned, and crops are planted for a few seasons only. Then the soil becomes depleted and the farmer moves on, beginning the cycle anew.

Alternatively, finding sustainable development methods would allow for long term income sources (eco-tourism, for example) rather than a brief period of relative wealth.

Keep the forest.

One of my thoughts was, that if the rainforest was cut down and farmed the revenue would go to the government. As i’ve heard there is corruption in some south american governments and I wondered how much would actually go to the local economy if it was to be chopped.

@syz GA.
Soils in rain forest areas typically are low in sustainable nutrients. The rain forest ecology tends to constantly recycle the existing nutrients. Modern day agricultural takes a lot of nutrients out of the ground in the form of the crops, so lots of nutrients have to be brought in as fertilizer. We should be working to preserve the better agricultural lands so we don’t have to use rain forest areas.

From the point of view of long term survival, keep the rainforest at any cost. Without it, development will be rapid, lucrative and not sustainable. We have had examples of this in the West Indies: Antigua was covered with forest and high rainfall until it was cleared for sugar. It is now one of the driest islands in the archipelago. To add insult to injury, very little of the sugar wealth accrued to Antigua.

It is not necessary to ‘chop’ a rainforest in order to harvest a cash crop. There are many possibilities to discover ways to market what is already growing there.