Honduras Protects Forests by "Selling" Oxygen
9/5/99
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Title: Honduras Protects Forests by "Selling" Oxygen
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: September 5, 1999
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, (Reuters) - Honduras is joining other poor
nations that "sell" oxygen to industrialized countries and use the
money to protect tropical forests, in an agreement with Canada to be
signed on Sept. 15.
Such deals are born from concern that developed nations like Canada
produce large amounts of carbon dioxide, the gas believed to cause
global warming.
Therefore, the thinking goes, these countries are morally responsible
to help pay for the protection of endangered carbon dioxide-consuming
ecosystems, such as Honduran tropical forests, by symbolically
"buying" oxygen.
Honduras, of course, will not deliver oxygen to Canada. Instead, the
two countries will establish a joint office in Honduras to monitor
forest conservation efforts and certify programs that are working to
save the forests.
"This is a good opportunity to obtain resources from developed
countries for forest protection," Honduran Environment Minister
Xiomara Gomez told Reuters in an interview.
The office will certify measures that save the forest and presumably
conserve the amount of oxygen produced, such as reforestation,
growing coffee in shady plantations instead of sunny fields, and
forest protection programs.
The office will also work on defining the quantity of carbon dioxide
that Honduran forests consume.
Gomez said exports estimate that Honduran forests absorb between five
million and 10 million tons of carbon dioxide a year and that the
country would try to get between $10 and $30 per ton.
Gomez said some 266,000 acres of Honduran tropical forests are
destroyed every year, by timber companies, fires and peasant farmers
clearing fields to plant crops.
"We are going to widen vigilance and control of protected and
forested zones to guarantee there is wise use of the resource, and
natural regeneration," Gomez said.
She said another Central American nation, Costa Rica, has been
engaged in similar deals for several years and that Honduras had its
eye on the United States and Germany as potential customers for
oxygen.
"We are taking action to get into the oxygen-selling market. We have
great potential," Gomez said.
Copyright 1999 Reuters.