Not even new jobs are needed, just a little income support would do

Sir Prof Jacob Borne makes a well argued case for to "Give the tree choppers more profitable jobs than logging" December 31 but I would add that since chopping logs is really not that profitable we should just give some income support to all those who live in the tropical rainforests and engage in traditional and environmentally sustainable non-logging activities.

We actually do not need to produce new high tech manufacturing jobs in the Amazon; a couple of hundred dollars per family a month, for them to improve their living conditions, while they keep an eye on their forest for all of us would do wonders.

The problem is that though we quite easily find ways to support our local parks and national forest reserves this seems so much harder when it comes to maintaining the health of our global common goods like our lungs in the Amazon.

Forest destruction is it a threat or is it a reality?

Sir John Aglionby and Fiona Harvey when reporting on September 13 that “Forest nations press for carbon credits to help cut greenhouse gas” mention “that many governments fear rainforest nations could use the threat of destruction of their forest as a bargaining chip in climate change negotiations”. What threat of destruction? They are destroying them now.

I recently told a prominent-save-the-Amazon person that they should, at 7 am each and every morning, put a matchstick to one hectare of pristine Amazon jungle and transmit this on the web and then perhaps the world could easier understand that it needs urgently to create some huge world forest reserves. These reserves could be managed and cared for by hundreds of thousand forest-guard families and who could all be helped to partially improve their lives receiving a small monthly salary from the whole world, financed perhaps through the levy of a special forestry tax of one cent per litre of petrol.

In 2004 while an Executive Director at the World Bank we were asked at the Board to approve a loan to Brazil for “Environmental Sustainability” and I told my colleagues that what we really should be approving was how much each one of all the world countries would have to chip in to help repay that loan, since obviously keeping our most important lung clean could not only be Brazil’s responsibility.

Does burning 365 hectares per year sound awful? Well the same report indicates that only in Indonesia 1.87m of hectares have been lost every year since 2000. Now having said that… please be careful with the matches though.