Thousands of Square Miles of Forest are Lost every Year
4/29/98
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Title: Thousands of Square Miles of Forest are Lost every Year
Source: BBC News
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 4/29/98
One thousand tributaries run into the Amazon, which meanders for nearly 4,000
miles and deposits 170 billion gallons of water an hour into the sea. That's 60
times more the volume of water carried by the Nile.
The Amazon area, which covers parts of Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia, covers 2.7
million square miles. A typical four square mile patch of jungle contains 750
species of tree, 400 types of birds and 125 mammal species.
It is not uncommon to find butterflies with eight-inch wings, caterpillars as
long as snakes and carnivorous plants which exude the stench of rotting meat in
order to trick flies into pollinating them.
But the rainforest has been on the retreat for years. In 1987, at the height
of the "slash and burn" offensive, 320,000 square miles of jungle were razed.
In recent years, that figure fell gradually to around 11,000 square miles a
year. But new satellite data suggests burnings are up again this year by 28%,
possibly as a result of Brazil's economic recovery.
Unique biodiversity
Environmentalists fear the loss of the rainforest's unique biodiversity. They
point out the Amazon is home to plant species which provide everything from
chocolate to today's most important medicines. And they warn that if the area
is destroyed, its untold secrets will never be revealed.
Scientists believe global warming will speed up because the vast amounts of
cloud produced by the jungle help mask the heat of the sun.
The forest also traps large numbers of carbons which, if lost to the
atmosphere, exaggerate the "greenhouse effect".
Environmentalists hope that a new World Bank deal to buy up vast tracts of land
in the rainforest will help slow the area's destruction.
Ed Wood Matthew, a spokesman for the World Wide Fund for Nature which at the
forefront of the deal, says previous Brazilian governments have made a string
of "broken promises" on combating deforestation.
But Mr Wood Matthew is confident the latest deal will not be another.
which comes only weeks after a series of devastating fires destroyed large
swathes of the jungle state of Roraima, showed Brazil was serious about
protecting forests.
"The World Bank agreement means they will really have the resources to make it
work," he said.
He added that the deal, which has been agreed by the head of the World Bank
James Wolfensohn and Brazil's President Fernando Enrique Cardoso, would not add
to the country's foreign debt of around o65bn ($110bn).