Source: AP.
Date: 18 July 91.
Story Type: News.
Original Language: English.
Dateline: Washington.
Byline: Carl Hartman.
Text: Abridged.
Brief Remark: Forwarded.
NEW WORLD BANK FOREST LOGGING POLICY
The World Bank announced Thursday it will end support for logging in
tropical forests, a practice environmentalists say destroys forests and
endangers the livelihood of 500 million people.
Michel Petit, a Frenchman who heads the bank's agriculture
department, said that in the future it will pay special attention to 20
countries that account for 85 acres out of every 100. These are also
countries where the forests are endangered. Among them are Brazil,
Mexico, the Ivory Coast, India, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Tropical rain forests are prized not only for the food, rubber and
other commercial products that come from them but especially for their
vast variety of plants, birds, animals and insects. Scientists see these
as an important source of new medicines and other chemicals which once
destroyed can never be revived.
"The bank and others have made mistakes in the past," Petit told a
news conference. "But it is not too late to change and to influence
others."
On Wednesday the seven summit leaders meeting in London said they
wanted to get an agreement on the principles of conserving forests
before June 1992. That is when the United Nations will have a conference
on the environment in Rio de Janeiro.
The seven also pledged financial support for a Brazilian program to
protect tropical forests. Though no amount of money was specified, a
World Bank official said it would be about $50 million for the first
phase of a $1.56 billion project.
The bank, owned by 155 countries, is the biggest source of aid loans
to the Third World -- $24 billion a year. Petit said since it was
founded in 1944 it has financed 80 forest projects costing more than
$2.3 billion.
Environmentalists complain that it has also sponsored projects which
promoted commercial logging, as well as the building of roads, dams and
mines and the promotion of farming that ruined or degraded forest land.
"The bank group will not under any circumstances finance commercial
logging in primary (tropical moist forests)," said a 70-page "Forest
Policy Paper" approved by its board Thursday.
It added that there would be a rigorous assessment of projects such
as roads, dams or mines which could lead to the loss of forests.
Petit said tropical forests can be restored but that they would never
have the variety of life in them that they had originally. Officials
said some environmentalists hope that in the 1990s the destruction can
be slowed down, so that by the new century forest acreage will be
growing instead of declining as it is now.
But Petit declined to set a precise goal, saying that the World Bank
is only one of the players involved.
Other officials at the news conference said they knew of no logging
now being done under bank projects and that other kinds of projects that
might have destructive side-effects are also being assessed.
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