Ecobreves – GUATEMALA: : Deforestation Advances

By IPS Correspondents and - - Reprint | | Print |

GUATEMALA CITY, Dec 19 2005 (IPS) - An environmental study by the private Rafael Landívar University indicates that Guatemala has lost 50 percent of the forests it had in 1950. This Central American country loses 60,000 hectares of forest annually, and plants just 14,000 hectares of trees each year, and those are mostly for commercial use, Carlos Albacete, director of the environmental group Trópico Verde, told Tierramérica.

“Even when many more hectares of trees are planted, we don't consider that recovery of forest, but rather that it is planted for the benefit of the lumber industry. In that sense, the government's achievements are not a success for forest conservation,” added the environmentalist.

Luis Rolando Zanotti, deputy manager of the government's national forestry institute, INAB, acknowledged that efforts to reverse deforestation are lacking, due to “the needs of the population, who push the agricultural frontier forward, even up the mountainsides.”