Associated Press
December 5, 2001
By Lisa J. Adams

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico could lose its tropical jungles within decades if the government doesn't seriously hike the amount of money it allocates to deal with deforestation, according to the environment secretary.

A study released Monday showed that Mexico lost an average of 2.72 million acres of forests and jungles each year between 1993 and 2000 nearly twice as much as what government officials had previously estimated.

"It has been quite a shock to encounter how grave the situation really is," said Victor Lichtinger, who blames the phenomenon primarily on the expansion of farmland and grazing areas, and to a lesser extent on illegal logging.

If the government doesn't spend some four to five times as much money trying to deal with the problem of deforestation, Mexico will have no tropical jungles left by the year 2059, he said Tuesday.

Among the jungles in critical danger, he said, are those on the Yucatan peninsula, in the southeastern Gulf coast states of Tabasco and Veracruz, and in southernmost Chiapas state.

Chiapas is home to the Lacandon rain forest, one of the most biologically diverse areas in the country and one that could disappear in 10-30 years if things don't change, Lichtinger said.

"We've lost 1.3 million acres in tropical forests alone," Lichtinger said. All together, Mexico lost 7.8 million pine and fir forests and tropical jungles during the seven-year period.

The loss of trees -- evident in dramatic satellite photographs taken for the study -- also has a grave effect on other areas of the environment, Lichtinger said.

It changes the formation and course of rivers, diminishes the soil's fertility and capacity to retain groundwater, reduces rainfall in deforested areas, and exacerbates natural disasters such as landslides, Lichtinger said.

He said the rapid loss of forests corresponds to a simultaneous increase in farming and grazing land cleared by the 10 million to 15 million poor farmers who have no other means of making a living, he said.

Mexico's confusing land-registry laws and decades of politically motivated land reforms have made it unclear who owns the lands in question, making it easy for squatters to occupy forests.

Lichtinger blames NAFTA-related government policies that subsidize the expansion of farmlands in an effort to compete with the United States' and Canada's farming subsidies.

A lesser culprit, he said, is illegal logging, an industry that state and local governments not only have failed to stop, but from which they have profited. Poor farmers participate in the industry by selling the most valuable wood from the forests before burning them to create farm and grazing land.