Tropical Africa for fuel exceeds the renewal of forest cover. The rain forests which remain in West Africa now merely are how they were hardly 30 years ago. In Guinea, Liberia and the Ivory Coast, there is almost no primary forest cover left unscathed; in Ghana the situation is much worse, and nearly all the rain forest are cut down. Guinea-Bissau loses 200 to 350 km² of forest yearly, Senegal 500 km² of wooded savanna, and Nigeria 6,000,050,000 of both. Liberia exploits 800 km² of forests each year. Extrapolating from present rates of loss, botanist Peter Raven pictures that the majority of
West Africa this land is plains lying less than 300 meters above sea level, though isolated high points exist in numerous states along the southern shore of West Africa. The northern section of West Africa (narrowly defined to exclude the western Maghreb) is composed of semi-arid terrain known as Sahel, a transitional zone between the Sahara and the savannahs of the western Sudan. Forests form a belt between the savannas and the southern coast, ranging from 160 km to 240 km in width. The northwest African region of Mauritania periodically suffers country-wide plagues of locusts which consume water, salt and crops on