If it were simply a matter of passing strong laws to protect it, the Amazon rainforest—the

world's largest tropical forest, around the size of western Europe—would be safe. Brazil, whose territory includes about two-thirds of the forests has impressively tough laws that, on paper, set most of it aside as a nature reserve and impose stiff penalties for illegal logging. But the latest annual figures for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, published by the government on Wednesday May 18th, have confirmed a disturbing recent trend: the destruction is accelerating despite all efforts to control it. In 2004 August, more than 26,000 square kilometres(10,000 square miles) of forest were chopped down, an area larger than the American state of New Jersey.

The area deforested in the past year was up 6% in 2003, far worse than the Brazilian government's predictions that it would rise by no more than about 2%. It was the second worst year for the destruction of the rainforest since satellite surveys began. It is reckoned that almost a fifth of the Brazilian part of the forest has now been wiped outs if it were to continue at this rate, it would all be flattened within the next two centuries. Things are hardly any better in those portions of Amazonia that lie in neighboring countries: Ecuador has lost about half of its forest, mainly due to illegal logging, in the past 30 years. Worse still, tropical forests have been disappearing at an even faster rate elsewhere in the world, such as in Africa. The world's greatest stores of biodiversity—and some of its main suppliers of the oxygen we breathe—are still being chewed up at an alarming rate, despite decades of talk among world leaders and environmentalists about the need to preserve them.

As has been seen before in Brazil, the surge in the rate of deforestation is a sign that the country's economy is booming—recently it bas been growing at an annual rate of around 5%. Most of the timber felled illegally in Amazonia is sold to domestic buyers, in particular to the construction industry in Brazil's richer southern states. But the forest is also threatened by the rapid expansion of farming and ranching. In the past year, almost half of the total deforestation was in the state of Mato Grosso on the forest's southern part, where huge areas have been flattened to grow soybeans. Last year Brazil earned about $10 billion from exporting soy products, exceeding its income from coffee' and sugar, the country's traditional export crops. Mato Grosso's governor, Blairo Maggi, is also its soybean king—his family's farms are' the world's largest single producer of the crop.

The rate at which the forest is being flattened could easily rise further. To boost the region's economic development and make attack on poverty, the government plans to asphalt(铺设沥青) and widen the BR-163 highway that slices the forest roughly in half, running from north to south. Though the government has been working with environmental groups and others to try to limit the scheme's impact, past experience has shown that improved road access invariably means more intrusion of the forest by loggers, ranchers, farmers, mineral prospectors and others.

For much of Brazil's recent history, in particular during the country's 1964-85 military dictatorship, successive governments were obsessed(困扰) with populating and "developing" Amazonia, convinced that otherwise a foreign power might seize it. Large sums were spent building highways to open up the forest and a lot of subsidies were offered to get people to resettle there. However, the huge area of abandoned former forest land alongside previous road schemes show that, in fact, much of the region lacks suitable soil and climate for agriculture.

More recent governments have taken the axe to the worse schemes that encouraged people to destroy the rainforest. Besides Brazil's tough conservation laws, there are now countl

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