Copyright 2001 Agence France-Presse
October 3, 2001

GENEVA, Oct 3, (AFP) - Forests are disappearing at a rapid rate in tropical countries but are on the increase in Europe where they help to protect biodiversity and provide jobs, said a new report published in Geneva on Wednesday by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

But the biggest threat to successful forest management is corruption and illegal forest practices, the FAO said in its biannual report, State of the World's Forests 2001.

"During the 1990s, the loss of natural forests was 16.1 million hectares per year, of which 15.2 million occurred in the tropics", the organisation explained. Deforestation was highest in Africa and South America.

The organisation said the major cause for the loss and degradation of natural forests was conversion to other land uses and to agriculture in particular.

Only one million hectares of this lost land was later re-used for forest plantations, it said.

"The countries with the highest net loss of forest area between 1990 and 2000 were Argentina, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Myanmar, Mexico, Nigeria, Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe," said the report.

Elsewhere, however, natural forests have been growing at a rate of 3.6 million hectares a year, mainly in non-tropical countries, it said.

"Forest expansion has been occurring for several decades in many industrialised countries, especially where agriculture is no longer an economically viable land use," the FAO said.

The report particularly aimed to debunk various myths about the state of European forests which it said were now expanding by about 880 thousand hectares a year.

It pointed out that Russia's forest area was the world's largest at 851 million hectares, a fifth of the global total.

In the rest of Europe, it said: "Forests cover about 38 percent of the land area, conserving biodiversity, protecting against erosion and providing employment, recreation, wood and a wide range of other goods and services, many of them not yet economically valued.

"This counteracts their relative lack of importance in conventional GDP calculations," it said.

In terms of area, the biggest net gains of forest were in China, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation and the United States. In many cases, these were boosted by specific plantation policies.

Out of a total of 3.1 million hectares of forest planted each year, 1.2 million was in non-tropical areas.

But the report warned that efforts to improve forest management will only be successful by fighting crime and corruption. "Illegal and corrupt activities threaten the world's forests in many countries, particularly but not exclusively in forest-rich developing countries," it said.

And in some cases, the FAO claimed illegal logging and trade appeared to be growing as a consequence of trade liberalization and globalization.

It listed a range of illegal forest practices such as the approval of illegal contracts with private enterprises by public servants, the harvesting of protected trees by commercial corporations and the smuggling of forest products across borders.

High timber values, low government official salaries and a large number of poorly-designed regulations are amongst other factors which the FAO said create a favourable environment for forest crime and corruption.

Other factors which the report cited for loss of natural forests include atmospheric pollution, high winds and drought which have contributed to a range of severe fires across the world.

Regarding bans and restrictions on commercial logging, the report said they had contributed to conservation in some countries but in others "they have negatively affected the forest sector and local communities or have simply transferred the problem of overharvesting to other countries."

Sustainable forest management and forest certification, however, was gaining momentum, according to the report, with an estimated 12 percent of the world's forests under protected area status. Error: Unable to read footer file.