FAO: Don't blame logging alone for high rate of deforestation
FAO: Don't blame logging alone for high rate of deforestation
Vijay Joshi, Associated Press, Bangkok
Forests in Southeast Asia are disappearing at an alarming rate, but logging alone is not to blame as is widely done, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said Tuesday.
The main causes of deforestation are forest fires and conversion of forest land for agriculture such as the slash-and- burn method used in Indonesia and the Philippines, Patrick Durst, the senior forestry officer of the FAO, told reporters.
He said that deforestation, seen mostly in developing countries, is the result of increasing population and poverty.
"When people have opportunities to make money from something other than the forest .... they often take that opportunity," he said.
"The best solution to the deforestation problem is economic development," he told a news conference to release a report of a study commissioned by the FAO on the impact of logging on natural forests in Asia-Pacific.
The report says governments in the region have banned logging mostly as a knee-jerk reaction to activists calling for action, usually after flash floods caused by soil erosion.
The logging bans are "an extreme measure with sometimes unpredictable or unintended impacts," says the report titled "Forests out of bounds."
It says that often logging ban in one country results in increased logging in neighboring countries where enforcement is lax, such as in Cambodia and Myanmar, which supply illicit timber to Thailand. Logging ban also encourages corruption and deprives livelihoods to poor forest dwellers, it says.
"A key conclusion to be drawn from the Asia-Pacific experience is that logging bans are neither inherently good nor bad," says the report on the study conducted over 2 1/2 years in China, New Zealand, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.
According to the FAO, Southeast Asia is losing forests five times faster than the global net annual forest loss of 0.2 percent experienced worldwide between 1990 and 2000.
Even after the logging bans were imposed, the forest cover had reduced in four out of the six countries studied by the FAO.
The biggest loser was the Philippines where the forest cover reduced from 38.4 percent of the country's total land in 1980 to 19.4 percent in 2000. Philippines banned logging in 1991. In Thailand, only 28.9 percent of the total land is covered by forest at present, compared to 36.4 percent in 1980 even though logging was banned in 1989.