A solution for forests

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