Source: Latin American Herald Tribune
LIMA – A report from the National Ombud’s Office revealed that 150,000 hectares (579 square miles) of Peruvian Amazon forest is lost each year due to deforestation and environmental degradation.
Peru has 68 million hectares (262,550 sq. mi.) of Amazon rainforest, Ombud Beatriz Merino said Tuesday during the presentation of the report.
She said it is “absolutely unacceptable” that an expanse of territory 10 times the size of Callao, a leading port city west of Lima, disappears each year “as a result of deforestation and the degradation of our natural forests.”
Merino said 42 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are due to the degradation of forest soils and said the situation is especially worrisome because forests are the lifeblood of Amazon indigenous communities.
Faced with a lack of government aid and public services, Amazon communities cut down trees to cover their basic necessities even though they know they should protect those resources, according to the report from the ombud’s office.
The document describes the operations of 81 offices of state institutions dedicated to the preservation of forest resources and evaluates the work of eight regional governments located in the Amazon region.
Merino said 38 of those offices have an average of three people for their field work, while just three of them have pickup trucks that are in good condition and only one has a boat for transportation in that vast territory.
“This is something that requires the government’s urgent and immediate attention,” Merino said, adding that Congress must debate and approve a new government-sponsored Amazon forest bill, which was submitted after the repeal of previous legislation that had sparked violent Indian protests last year.
The so-called “laws of the jungle,” approved last year to bring Peru’s regulatory framework into compliance with a free-trade agreement signed with the United States, led to one of the worst crises of President Alan Garcia’s government when violent protests in the city of Bagua left at least 34 dead, including police.
While Peruvian authorities said those laws were intended to protect the forests from indiscriminate logging, indigenous communities complained that they infringed on their ownership rights to land and water in the Amazon jungle.
For his part, the top environmental official in the ombud’s office, Ivan Lanegra, said 145 Indian communities have valid permits to sell lumber but only eight are actually in a position to market the product.
He therefore called on the Agriculture Ministry and the regional governments to strengthen Indian communities’ capacity to sustainably and properly market those natural resources. EFE