Print

Mail

wiki links

Amazonian deforestation rate skyrockets 40 percent

Forest facts and figures * The Amazon rainforests lost an area the size of Albania in the last year. * Almost 80 percent of timber in the rainforests is illegally felled. * The spread of soya farming has been blamed for the big increase in deforestation. * Around 86 percent of the Amazon rainforests are intact.

The deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon, the largest stretch of forest in the world, has increased by 40 percent in the past year, according to preliminary figures released on Friday by the Brazilian government.

Almost 24,000km2 of virgin forest -- an area the size of Albania -- were lost, mainly to soya farming and logging.

The figures do not include the destruction of the forest by fires which have been intense this year in some Amazonian states.

"We are going to take emergency action to deal with this highly worrying rise in deforestation," said the environment minister, Marina Silva, a former Amazonian rubber tapper and environmental activist.

She promised to announce new measures to protect the forest, but environment groups fear that there is little that can be done unless new threats like industrial scale farming can be brought under control.

"These figures are the worst in many years. It is alarming how the agriculture frontier is growing," said a Greenpeace Brazil spokesman, Paulo Adario.

"Almost 80 percent of the timber is illegally felled, but clearing land for industrial soya farming is now taking over from timber extraction as the major driver of forest loss in some regions."

Most of the deforestation is taking place in the southern Amazon, where soya farming is rapidly moving in to Para and Matto Grosso states.

"It was a long, dry season, but the deforestation figures are at least 30 or 40 percent higher than historical trends," said David Cleary, director of the Amazon programme at the US Nature Conservancy in Brazil. "If ways are not found to minimize the impact of the spread of soya farming, it is difficult to see these figures falling in coming years," he added.

The soya boom has been fuelled by European consumers who have rejected GM soya from the US in favour of the conventionally-grown crop from Brazil. During the past three years, Brazil's share of the world soya market has risen from 24 percent to 34 percent, while the US share has declined from 57 percent to 43 percent.

Brazil is expected to overtake US production within five years, but it may be at the expense of the Amazon forest.

A series of scientific reports have suggested that the Amazon forests, which are still 86 percent intact, face rapid future destruction because of interlinked climatic and human forces.

The previous Brazilian government planned to invest more than US$40 billion in new roads, railroads, reservoirs, power lines and gas lines in the Amazon over the next few years.

This was expected to increase forest loss dramatically, and to make the forests more prone to destruction by fire. However, the present government has not yet committed itself fully to the plan.

Rainforests cover less than 2 percent of the Earth's surface, yet they are home to some 40 to 50 percent of all life forms -- as many as 30 million species of plants, animals and insects.

Up to 30 percent of the world's animal and plant species are found nowhere but in the Amazon, an area of 4.1 million square kilometers -- larger than western Europe.
This story has been viewed 1567 times.