Illegal logging and farming in Brazil’s Amazon last year destroyed 6,347 square miles of rainforest, an area bigger than Hawaii, according to a report released this week by the Brazilian government. The report found that despite increased policing of threatened areas, the pace of deforestation in the world’s largest rainforest remained as high in 1999 as it was 1998, a rate 31 percent higher than that of 1997 and comparable to the high rates of the late 1980s. Altogether, 14 percent of the Brazilian Amazon has been destroyed, satellite data show. In one positive development, a coalition of 40 Brazilian companies has launched a purchasing group that pledges to use only timber certified as having been legally logged, the first such effort in a developing country.
