Word: timber
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That may soon change. The governments of Guyana and Suriname have begun to open huge tracts of forests for logging by timber and trading companies from Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia. Conservationists around the world are horrified at the prospect, aware that in southern Asia the loggers have ravaged forests, leaving a legacy of eroded hills, silt-choked rivers and barren fields. If such exploitation cannot be prevented in sparsely populated countries like Guyana and Suriname, the environmentalists ask, can deforestation be stopped anywhere? For thousands of years, deforestation has presaged the fall of civilizations. Now, for the first time, humanity...
...officials were receptive in August 1993 when an Indonesian investment group named N.V. MUSA Indo-Suriname asked to buy the rights to Suriname's trees. Cash-starved regimes are fond of selling timber concessions because they can put money in a treasury at little immediate cost to the government, while other industries can take years to produce results. Timber operations often ultimately drain more money than they yield by burdening a nation's infrastructure and degrading precious natural assets, but it is easy for a sitting government to ignore these costs because they become a problem only for subsequent administrations...
...MUSA group boldly asked for timber rights to more than 15 million acres of Suriname, nearly one-third of the country. The Venetiaan administration avoided a messy political debate by instead granting a smaller concession of 375,000 acres near the Guyana border. MUSA then began logging without specifying how it will abide by Suriname's strict forestry code. Experts claim that the only profitable way to harvest MUSA's particular stretch of rain forest would be to clear-cut the region, leaving behind a wasteland. Other Asian interests have also put in timber bids. The Malaysian investment group Berjaya...
...loaders to automatic weapons left behind during the war. Alan Rabinowitz, the organizer of the WCS team, says that the area still has remarkable diversity but that all species have been radically reduced by hunting. Laotian trees are also under threat, as deforested neighboring countries look covetously at Laos' timber...
...Pacific's holdings -- on which fast-growing second- and third-generation redwoods are reaching market size. But it is willing, perhaps eager, to sell Headwaters and a logged-over 1,500-acre buffer zone for something more than $500 million, the Forest Service estimate of the value of the timber. Hamburg thinks the figure % is far too high...