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.