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Rainforest Destruction Drops 25 Percent: Report

Rainforest Destruction

First Posted: 06/ 3/11 04:22 PM ET Updated: 06/ 3/11 05:12 PM ET

There's reason to breathe easier.

Rainforest destruction in the word's largest rainforests plunged by 25 percent over the last decade, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

From Reuters:

A report entitled The State of the Forests in the Amazon Basin, Congo Basin and South East Asia, was released to coincide with a summit in the Congo Republic bringing together delegates from 35 countries occupying those forests, with a view to reaching a global deal on management and conservation.

The Amazon and the Congo are the world's first and second biggest forests, respectively, and its third biggest -- the Borneo Mekong -- is in Indonesia.

The rainforests suck up billions of tonnes of carbon from the air and are home to two thirds of the earth's land species.

The report's author, Mette Wilkie, cautioned that the drop in destruction is not cause for celebration.

"Deforestation is higher than it ought to be," she said.

Story continues below

The remaining challenge, according to Wilkie, is to balance the need to stop cutting down the rainforest with the growing demand for food, which is expected to increase by 70 percent by 2050. Rainforests are often decimated in the name of creating farmland.

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There's reason to breathe easier. Rainforest destruction in the word's largest rainforests plunged by 25 percent over the last decade, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization...
There's reason to breathe easier. Rainforest destruction in the word's largest rainforests plunged by 25 percent over the last decade, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization...
 
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HUFFPOST SUPER USER
b525
23 minutes ago (11:16 PM)
One of the biggest destroyers of forest/spe­cies diversity in the tropics is cattle and soy farming.

Clearing rainforest to create temporary/­artificial grasslands for cattle, in tropical forest areas, is highly destructiv­e to tropical topsoil, rivers and biodiversi­ty.

Cattle should be raised in areas where grasslands and grazing animals occur naturally.

After tropical rainforest is cleared to create cattle ranches and soy farms, the heavy year around tropical rains washes away the topsoil, which was once protected, for millions of years, under the forest canopy.

The intense year round tropical sun then scorches and dries out the topsoil, further increasing erosion/so­il run-off into local rivers and streams.

As the eroded soil, heavy metals and farm chemicals caused by ranching, soy farming, mining and forest-cle­aring washes into rivers, it then suffocates fish and buries fish eggs.

This eroded soil and debris then washes down rivers and out to coastal areas, burying and killing corals and other coastal sea-floor life.

The temporary grasslands­/farmlands created by clearing tropical forest then becomes quickly degraded and unfarmable­, forcing the ranchers and farmers to clear-out even more rainforest to maintain profits/fa­rming.

In the process Amazon Indians are forced out of their forested homelands and often killed by the cattle ranchers, soy farmers and timber cutters, who are often paid by the farmers.

The Indians main source of protein, river fish, becomes increasing­ly scarce and their forced to migrate even deeper into remaining jungle to find clean water/fish­.
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HUFFPOST SUPER USER
KarlaElisa
The atmosphere is Toxic
02:53 PM on 6/04/2011
i'm betting it 'dropped 25%' because somebody redefined 'destructi­on'.
01:06 PM on 6/04/2011
Oh happy day.......­....
Death of rainforest slows to long, cruel.....­.......
Deep Thinking Man
Always Remember, A Wet Bird Never Flies At Night !
09:45 PM on 6/03/2011
glad you explained this HP. the headline was mis-leadin­g...made me think the Rain Forest destructio­n dropped 25% since your headline posted a few days ago.
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bad spelling grammar
Keep the world GREEN!
06:50 PM on 6/03/2011
I hope this statement is true because there are a lot of other articles that say that in Brazil and South East Asia deforestat­ion has increased over the last few years.
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HUFFPOST SUPER USER
KarlaElisa
The atmosphere is Toxic
02:54 PM on 6/04/2011
right....s­ee, it's a language thing...it­'s always how you define and spin something. just posted a couple of posts above this that it probably has more to do with what the definition of destructio­n has been changed to now.