Friday, July 8, 2011

The race for land is destroying the Guatemalan rainforest

Stéphane Foucart in the Guardian (UK) via Le Monde: There are cows as far as the eye can see beside the road leading to the archaeological site of La Joyanca, in north-west Guatemala. Over the last 10 years, the primal forest has been cut down, replaced by grassland for intensive cattle farming. Here in the Petén region, around as well as inside the Laguna del Tigre National Park, agriculture is inexorably devouring the forest.

The process has been triggered incrementally in a series of seemingly minor steps. "At the end of the 1980s, when this zone was not yet a national park, Basic Petroleum obtained an oil exploration concession in the Laguna del Tigre area, in the heart of the forest," said Marco Cerezo, a Guatemalan environmentalist who founded FundaEco, a leading NGO dedicated to nature conservation and development. "Later, the oil companies asked for, and obtained, permission to build a road to their oil wells. And that is where the land clearing started, all along that road. Now approximately 40% of the national park has been cleared."

The same thing is happening across the Petén region, which extends across the northern half of the country to the border with Belize and Mexico. According to the latest report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published at the end of 2010, Guatemala has experienced the most rapid deforestation of any country over the last five years.

In 2010, primary forest accounted for 1.6m hectares, compared with 2.4m 20 years earlier. Guatemala, which, after Brazil, has South America's second-largest rainforest cover, lost an average of 27,000 hectares a year between 2000 and 2005 (a rate of 1.32% per year), increasing to 68,000 hectares a year between 2005 and 2010 (3.72% per year), meaning that the rate of deforestation has almost trebled in the course of a decade....

Tecuamburro, seen here from the north, is a small, forested stratovolcano or lava-dome complex of mostly Pleistocene age. Shot by Lee Siebert, Smithsonian Institution, public domain

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