And the price of one of its main products--palm oil, widely used for cooking in tropical Africa--also went haywire.
Like many developing countries in tropical Africa, Latin America and Asia, Liberia possesses a vast wealth of biologically rich and globally important forests, despite its difficult economic circumstances.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Seeing the carbon for the trees
At one time or another, indigenous people in tropical Africa and South America knew how to cultivate and prepare nutritious food by selective breeding of as many as 30, 000 species of plants.
One million trees will be planted in Uganda to sustain an area of tropical forest in Africa the size of Wales.
The humidity and sub-tropical rain in South Africa's port city of Durban is doing little to dampen the enthusiasm for the fifth Brics summit, the first time the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have met in Africa.
Donors need to spend their aid on ends that can be easily checked and measured: research on Africa's tropical diseases, particular vaccination programmes, say, or the provision of specified health or educational services.
Tuesday's report describes Sandy's beginnings as a tropical wave off the coast of Africa on Oct. 11 that initially produced a wide area of showers and thunderstorms in the eastern Atlantic.
But Ana Rodrigues believes the conclusions probably hold true for other countries stocked with tropical forests in southeast Asia or west Africa.
These include the tropical Andes, the Brazilian Atlantic forests and Africa's Cape floristic region.
Africa's year-round tropical temperatures offer no winter to freeze off disease cycles, so each year nearly half the sweet potato crop fails.
The disease is so heavily concentrated in the poorest tropical countries, and overwhelmingly in sub-Saharan Africa, that nobody even bothers to keep an accurate count of clinical cases or deaths.
It is thought that some of the rare tropical diseases may have emerged from the forests of Africa where they have been harboured for thousands of years by species that would previously not have come into contact with humans.
From Sri Lanka to the Seychelles, South Africa to Costa Rica, it sources some of its more tropical plants and works on projects that promote sustainable development.
In an analysis of 504 world languages, Dr. Atkinson found that, on average, dialects with the most phonemes are spoken in Africa, while those with the fewest phonemes are spoken in South America and on tropical islands in the Pacific.
WSJ: Study Points to a Single, Original Language for All Humans
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