Protection of tropical forests: three main obstacles

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in 2005 the earth had only 4 billion hectares of forest, covering 31% of the area. About half of the forest area is in the tropics, mainly 'rainforest', where Brazil accounts for more than half.

Tropical forests are still devastated

For 60 years, 60% of tropical forests have been burned. In the 1990s, up to 16 million hectares of forest were burned each year. Currently, deforestation has slowed somewhat, especially in Brazil. Last December, the Brazilian Environment Ministry announced that deforestation in Amazon fell 14% between 2009 and 2010. Brazil is committed to reducing deforestation 80% from now until 2020.

Governments, NGOs, scientists as well as investors have proposed an international program called REDD ( Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation ) to reduce emissions from deforestation. and degraded forest phenomenon. With a budget of 4.5 billion USD, this program aims to motivate rich countries to finance poor countries to stop deforestation.

But in fact, tropical forests continue to be threatened. The first is because of climate change: arid, drought, the proliferation of harmful insects, forest fires . making the forest area more narrow. If the earth is 3.5 ° C hotter, half of the rainforest area will be removed, making most of the CO2 it contains (about 50 billion tons) escape into space.

Threatening the second is human. By 2050, the earth will have about 9 billion people. In order to feed more than 2 billion people who mostly live in tropical countries, it is inevitable that deforestation is inevitable for agricultural land and livestock.

Several measures against deforestation

In June 2010, Daniel Avelino, the chief of police in the state of Pará (Brazil), where most of the Amazon region's cows were raised, fined 20 large ranches and slaughterhouses for 2 billion dollars (about 1.2 billion USD). ) and informing major Western distribution companies (Walmart, Carrefour .) that they will be severely fined if they continue to buy illegal beef. The very next day, distribution companies stopped buying meat from the state of Pará, causing slaughterhouses to close and promising to only buy cows and sheep from farms that provided enough information about the land used for breeding. farming and commitment to not destroy forests. About 20,000 farmers in the state of Pará have committed so.

Ecuador's oil spill affected the Amazon rainforest. Photo: TL

Due to consumer pressure in developed countries interested in protecting the environment, more and more tropical countries accept Western standards throughout the supply chain.

But it is still very difficult. First of all, financially. Despite the sense of environmental protection, most consumers still do not want to spend more money to buy products that are produced in a sustainable way. Issuing certificates (stating their origins) is quite expensive. For example, Uruguay has a chip system for calves, but costs an average of $ 20 per child. The second resistance is the reliability of information systems. The third and most important obstacle: the majority of tropical materials consumed in markets are not interested in protecting the environment. The majority of tropical timber comes from the Amazon forest, which is used by indigenous people, up to 80% consumed in Brazil. Wood importers like China and India are not very interested in the origin of wood. As for Brazilian beef, it is mainly imported by Russia, Iran, Egypt . and these countries are not the people who care much about protecting the environment.

In 2008, the US Lacey Act on natural protection was revised to punish illegal entry of illegal logs. But it is difficult to prove whether the origin of the wood is legal or not, especially when wood comes from a country where everything is not as transparent as Cameroon and then processed in a country like China. In July 2010, the European Union also passed a law banning illegal logging.

It must also be recalled that some countries are seeking to buy forest land in the tropics, while being cheap and having lots of rainwater. For example, China has received restoration and construction of 6,000km of roads in the Democratic Republic of Congo (up to 134 million hectares of rainforest), because they want to intensify in this country palm trees to produce oil that China is a country. Enter the most in the world.