A solution for forests

The world's forests have been under siege since the turn of the century, but this year has been calamitous. In Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Central America, Africa and Indonesia, fires have destroyed some 16 million forested hectares (40 million acres). the easy explanation is El Nino, a perverse weather system that has flooded some regions but left others bone dry. But the main culprit, as always, is human activity, chiefly logging, mining and agriculture, which dries out the forest by stripping it bare of its trees, leaving even humid tropical rain forests vulnerable to fire. For that reason, the fires are likely to reoccur, with or without El Nino, unless something is done to curb mankind's insatiable appetite for wood.

In that context, there was a small ray of hope in the announcement this month that Suriname had decided to give permanent protection to 1.6 million hectares of untouched tropical forests, about one-tenth of the entire country. Suriname reached its decision at the urging of Conservation International, an American environmental group that has set up a private trust fund to help it manage the area. The group became actively involved in Suriname several years ago, when Asian timber interests, having pretty much stripped their own countries of marketable hardwoods, sought timber rights on 4.4 million hectares of Suriname's forests. It rejected that deal, and has now put 1.6 million hectares out of reach.

What makes this decision so heartening is that Suriname is a poor country that might normally have jumped at the quick profits promised by foreign logging interests. Far richer nations, like Brazil, have been unable to resist these blandishments, and Asian timber interests are even now burrowing deeper into the Amazon rain forest. At the other end of the economic scale, Guyana, Suriname's destitute neighbor, has opened up two-thirds of its forest mass to foreign companies.

Suriname chose the long-term economic value of forests over short-term revenues from logging and other resource-depleting activities. It hopes over time to make money from tourism generated by the forests and its spectacular animal life, from non-timber forest products like tannins and resins, and from "bioprospecting" -- the search for medicines among forest plants. The U.S. National Institute of Health and big pharmaceutical companies like Bristol-Meyers Squibb are already engaged in this search.

This avenue has been left unexplored by most of the world's governments, which own 80 percent of the world's forests and which as a rule cannot see beyond the next truckload of mahogany.

-- The New York Times