4 — Wednesday, January 11, 1989 - North Shore News WE'VE ALL heard enougt about the threat to the rain forests by aow so that it would probably be a waste of time for me to go cn about it in detail again. There is some good news. And there is something we can do about it. Directly and immediately. As the recent murder of Brazilian rain forest defender Mendes Filho has shown, protec- ting the tropical forests in areas like the Amazon Basin is no business for lightweights. Filho, a labor organizer who campaigned Iong and hard to save the Amazon’s wildlife and rubber trees from cattle ranchers who buy up the land and burn the trees so they can provide cheap beef for the fast-food industry in North America and Europe, was shot to death a couple of weeks ago by hired gunmen. He had been hired, according to police, by cattle ranchers who were later captured in a gun battle. But of course these men aren’t the real culprits. The real culprits are the 83 multinational corporations operating in the Amazon Basin, offering characters such as these murderous cattle ranchers incredi- ble short-term profits. The mathematics of it is that every time you buy a hamburger, you contribute to the destruction of roughly 55 square feet of rain forest in Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil. The rain forests are disappearing at a rate of 72,000 acres a day. Okay. That's the bad news. The good news is that there are several programs in place to head off this diological holocaust. And although the scale is small, compared with the damage being done, they are successful programs and they are starting to take effect. The leaders in this exercise are the U.S,-based Nature Conservan- cy, which has been in the field for years — although mainly concern- ed with preserving {and in the United States -~ a new outfit call- ed Conservation International, and the ubiquitous World Wildlife Fund, whose Panda bear symbol is familiar to just about everyone. In Canada, it is the WWF cam- paign that is the best organized. In 1987, Canadians donated $500,000 so the WWF could buy up 20,000 acres of rain forest in Costa Rica to save it from being logged or burned to make way for ranches. The deal is sirnple. You send the WWF $25 and they send you back a certificate designating you as a “‘Guardian of The Rainforest.’’ That $25 allows the WWF to pur- chase one acre of land which is immediately protected from destruction. The way the scheme works is a reflection of a new level of sophistication in the conservation movement. Developing nations, mainly those in Latin America, owe nearly $1.2 trillion to public and private tending institutions, most of them in the United States, but Canadian banks are badly overexposed there too. One of the ways the interna- tional financial] system has responded to the debt crisis has been through the development of “*debt exchange programs.’’ Lender banks sell high-risk debts at substantiai discounts to other banks or corporations who want to invest in the debtor countries. These countries in turn are willing to offer equity in commercial and industrial projects is: exchange for the reduced debt notes. It’s called a ‘‘debt-for-equity’’ swap. In 1984, somebody got the bright idea of taking this a step further and converting debt into support for conservation activities. Debt swaps, it was suggested, could be made not only for equity investments in hotels and cement factories but also for investments that would help maintain the natu- ral resource base itself. It took until July, 1987, for the first debt-for-nature swap to take place. Conservation International purchased $650,000 of Bolivia's commercial debt through Citicorp Investment Bank for $100,000, which amounted to 15 cents on the doilar. For the bank, it was a return on a loan that had begun to iook ut- terly uncollectable, In exchange, the president of Bolivia earmarked 3.7 million acres of tropical! forest around an existing park as pro- tected area and set up a $250,000 trust fund in local currency to manage the newly-expanded reserve. That set the precedent. Since then, other programs have been started in Costa Rica and Belize. This year, the World Wildlife Fund, which last year saved the Monteverde Nature Reserve in Costa Rica, has plans to work sim- ilar deals in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and the Philippines. For information, write to the World Wildlife Fund, 60 St. Clair Avenue East, Suite 201, Toronto, Ontario, M47 'NS. There's no point sitting around wringing our hands while the biosphere goes to hell in a ham- burger bun. Here’s something we can do. Now. Before it’s too latee School Children USE THE NEWS ore than 1,000 kids of all Whether they deliver one edition a ages have paper routes week or all three, these carriers are with the North Shore News. responsible for the timely distribution of your newspaper with the flyers As carriers they learn a properly inserted. sense of responsibility and commitment and they learn tie value of making money. THE VOICE OF NORTH AND WEST VANCOUVER —rurmemnomeremmmrems §When North Shore ‘north shore. kids want to make money, they USE THE NEWS. SDA SUNDAY « WEDNE Y * FRIDAY We work for you! MANY SIDEWALK SALE SPECIALS WITH SAVINGS UP TO 60% OFF (SALE IN EFFECT JANUARY 12th TO JANUARY 22nd, 1989) CREATIVE Ki LYNN VALLEY CENTRE 987-3210 ie pt Oe Soop tae eth