BRAZIL

Deforestation In Brazil's Amazon Jumps In 1998

BRASILIA (William Schomberg, Reuters) - Deforestation of the Amazon in Brazil increased nearly 30 percent in 1998, despite new measures to curb destruction of the world's largest rainforest, the Brazilian government said Wednesday. Preliminary figures from satellite monitoring showed 6,500 square miles (16,800 square km) of forest -- more than half the size of Belgium -- was cleared last year. That was 27 percent higher than in 1997 but slightly lower than in 1996, the Environment Ministry said.

The latest figures took deforestation in the Amazon since 1972 to 205,385 square miles (532,086 square km), equivalent to 13.3 percent of the entire Amazon region or an area roughly equivalent to France, the ministry said in a statement. A ministry spokeswoman said the figures were an estimate and would be confirmed over the next year. ``It could be that they are correct, but also they might be incorrect,'' the spokeswoman said. New Environment Minister Jose Sarney Filho was quoted in the ministry statement as saying he would focus on the problems of poor Brazilians living in the Amazon as a means of slowing the rate of destruction.

Environmental group, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), said the figures showed Brazil's government was unable to bring deforestation under control. ``The new increase in the deforestation rate of the Amazon shows that the government has failed in its fight against this damaging practice,'' the WWF said in a statement. It said the latest figures were perhaps an underestimate because satellites monitoring the forest could only spot deforested areas of more than 14.8 acres (six hectares) and therefore did not pick up smaller clearings.

The WWF said several measures to curb deforestation announced by the government in January 1998 had not worked. Those measures included new restrictions on the use of fire to clear jungle -- a move which was effectively vetoed by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso afterward -- and new legislation for the forestry industry which has yet to take effect, the WWF statement said. Furthermore, a plan announced by Cardoso in April last year to protect 10 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been put on hold after $300,000 in World Bank funding was held up by Brazilian government paperwork, the WWF said.

NOTE: Christopher Hatch of the California-based Rainforest Action Network (RAN) claims that "the destruction of the Amazon will be the greatest natural catastrophe in the history of human civilization. Brazil is most at fault, but consumers and governments around the world have a role to play." RAN and other groups are calling for an international ban on the continued logging and destruction of the world's remaining old growth forests. Only 22 percent of the world's old growth forests remain intact.

 

Source: Reuters.

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