UK Will Cut Amazon Environment Program To Pay For Iraq

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"UK cuts rainforest funding to meet Iraq costs
By Marie Woolf, Chief Political Correspondent
12 November 2003


Britain is to slash its aid programme aimed at saving the Amazon rainforest and preserving the culture of its people to meet the soaring cost of rebuilding Iraq.

Environmentalists fear the Government's decision to review its £16m contribution to the international community's efforts to protect Amazonia could lead to further ecological and cultural devastation.

EDIT

The Department for International Development admitted it was scaling back cash for its aid projects to the Amazon in a written parliamentary reply to the Labour MP Barry Gardiner yesterday.

The number of trees felled in the Amazon region has risen by 40 per cent in the past year, with almost 10,000 square miles of virgin forest - an area 1.2 times the size of Wales - cut down. But the Government has admitted "the future" of schemes that were due to continue for another three years, "will have to be reviewed". The move was made after the Government's decision to pour £540m into the rebuilding of Iraq, which critics say is being spent at the expense of aid projects to some of the world's poorest nations."

EDIT

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=462904