Global deforestation continuing despite slowdown

ROME - The rate of global deforestation is slowing, but huge swathes of forest still disappear each year the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said.

The Rome-based agency said the slowdown was mainly due to new plantations in Europe and the United States, where forest areas are actually increasing.

In global terms, the current rate of net forest loss amounted to nine million hectares per year, 20 per cent lower than in 1995, the FAO said in its latest global forest survey.

In Asia, new plantations are largely compensating for the reduction in natural forests, which are disappearing most rapidly in Africa and Latin America.

"These differences cannot be explained by population pressure on forests alone. Rather, they are apparently the result of economic developments at large, and national forest or land use policies," said FAO's Director-General Jacques Diouf.

"Forestry surveys should address, on a sustainable basis, further development of the forestry sector which constitutes a backbone of world food security," Diouf said.

FAO said its Committee on Forestry, a leading forest policy conference attended by more than 100 member countries, was due to meet in Rome on March 12.

- REUTERS

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