The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest and home to the widest variety of plants and animals on earth. But deforestation is taking a toll on this natural, exotic tropical forest causing it to slowly disappear.

The Brazilian government has announced a huge rise in the rate of the Amazon deforestation, months after celebrating its success in achieving a reduction on the amount of forest being lost.

Although the deforestation rate in the Legal Amazon fell by 20 per cent between August 2006 and July 2007, according to a BBC article published January 2008, in the last five months of 2007, 3,235 sq km (1,250 sq miles) were lost mainly to logging.

The states of Pará, Mato Grosso and Rondônia together accounted for around 85 per cent of total deforestation in 2006-07. Where will an Amazon rainforest be in the next ten years? That is the uncertainty that many environmentalists and the Brazilian government are currently faced with at the moment.

The tropical rainforest, also known as the Amazon Basin, encompasses seven million square kilometres (1.2 billion acres), though the forest itself occupies some 5.5 million square kilometres, located within nine nations: Brazil (with 60 per cent of the rainforest), Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and the French Guyana.

Maria Angélica Ikeda, first secretary for Environment/Human Rights from the Brazil Embassy in London, explains that there has been a surge in numbers in the rate of deforestation in the Amazon over a couple of months.

“The government has the feeling that the price of commodity has been responsible for the increase in the deforestation rate,” says Maria, pointing to a possible reason for the situation presently.

She explains that the Legal Amazon is huge, even so larger than that of the European Union. She states that although it is a huge forest they also have big cities and “there are 15 million [people] living in the Amazon so you have to think about conserving the forest but at the same time think about their livelihoods”.

To address this issue, the Brazilian government has designed a plan of action where they identify the main areas of the Amazon where deforestation is occurring.

In the 36 municipalities, there are no more authorisations for deforestation, so that it is impossible to log without a permit.

She states that the government is taking control of the situation by re-registering property owners. Maria states that the Ministry of the Environment is trying to set up a system so that people could apply for exploring the forest but in a sustainable way.

Police operations alongside environmental agencies and the federal police have also intensified to find people who falsify permits. “In the end, we learned, actually, that some government officials from environmental agencies were involved in this which was a big shame for everybody,” Maria says.

“The Ministry of the Environment addressed a lot of transparency, recognising the problem and putting a lot of people in prison who are now being prosecuted,” she explains

But she sets the record straight about the situation currently facing the rainforest by saying that many people have a misconception that the entire Amazon has a deforestation problem which is in fact “not true”.

“People are focusing too much on the Amazon although we have other ecosystems in Brazil that are very biodiverse and precious such as the Wetlands south of the Amazon,” she says.

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