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Solution to illegal logging is aid, not trade bans: NGO

An international NGO for economic growth issues, World Growth, has called on the Asia-Pacific Rainforest Summit to ensure that rain forests prosper and remain productive instead of fencing them in

The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Tue, November 11, 2014

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Solution to illegal logging is aid, not trade bans: NGO

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n international NGO for economic growth issues, World Growth, has called on the Asia-Pacific Rainforest Summit to ensure that rain forests prosper and remain productive instead of fencing them in.

'€œEnvironmental activists have manufactured a scare campaign that rain forests are endangered to advance their anti-growth philosophy,'€ World Growth chairman Alan Oxley said on Tuesday.

'€œBy any international standard, rain forests are not on the verge of disappearing in South America, equatorial Africa or Southeast Asia and the Pacific,'€ he went on.

Oxley made the comments upon the release of the World Growth report entitled The Threat to Rainforests: Fact and Fiction.

The report shows forest cover in those regions is 50 to 60 percent of land in the equatorial latitudes, nearly double the forest cover in Europe where the campaign to save rain forests is most active.

'€œTake the case of the Brazilian Amazon rain forest, which activists claim is threatened. Eighty-six percent remains intact,'€ said Oxley in a press release on Tuesday.

He further said that in all tropical forest regions, countries had set aside more than the 15 percent of forest necessary to ensure species were conserved, as stipulated by parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

'€œEnvironmental activists, prominently Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), have cynically put forward a case that tropical rain forests will disappear overnight and that illegal logging is rife. They also falsely contend developing countries can prosper by establishing carbon conservation programs, rather than selling timber products or using forest land for growing crops,'€ Oxley said.

He said such campaign strategies had been developed to support the case that all commercial forestry should be halted, regardless of the economic harm that would cause.

'€œThe facts are different. Consider illegal clearing of forests. Most is done by the poor in the quest for fuel wood, shelter and land for subsistence farming,'€ Oxley said.

'€œThe solution to illegal logging is aid, not trade bans,'€ he added. (ebf)(+++)

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