Ecuador Maps 20-Year Plan to Slow Deforestation
Date: 20-Nov-03
Country: EQUADOR
Author: Amy Taxin
Environment Minister Cesar Narvaez said he expected the $800 million program would reduce the pace of deforestation by at least 30 percent by planting trees to replace lost acreage and produce timber to keep loggers away from pristine woods.
"The pressure on native forest is going to quickly diminish. We want to get out of this negative situation, out of the red," Narvaez told Reuters in an interview this week.
Seventy percent of the project will be financed by the private sector and 30 percent by the government. Narvaez said U.S., Japanese and Chilean firms had voiced interest in the program, which should be approved by the president this year.
Ecuador lost its forest cover three times faster than the Latin American region as a whole in the 1990s, according to estimates from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
It has an exceptional biodiversity and is home to an extraordinary number of bird and animal species in its Andean corridor, lush Amazon jungle and tropical Pacific coastland.
The deforestation has been mainly caused by agriculture and the colonization of remote lands by poor villagers.
The plan is also aimed at reducing illegal logging, which Narvaez estimates represents 70 percent of the timber industry, as Quito recovers from a setback to an innovative program to outsource forest controls to the private sector.
The nation's Constitutional Tribunal last month declared the program unconstitutional in response to a suit filed by the powerful timber lobby, which rendered invalid the government's contract with Swiss firm SGS .
Narvaez said the ministry would follow SGS's footsteps by charging loggers a fee - albeit a lower one - to finance controls despite the industry's complaints that what it considered exorbitant fees caused problems for their business.
"In the future international markets are going to want timber to be legal, not illegal, and the industrial sector knows this. They should worry more about this and help the ministry with controls," Narvaez said.
