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Outcry over deforestation as Suriname’s agriculture plans come to light

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Possible plans to develop large-scale agriculture in Suriname have sparked backlash from Indigenous communities, conservation groups and some members of parliament, who are concerned about deforestation of the Amazon and the fate of ancestral territories. Government documents, first published by Mongabay last year, showed that hundreds of thousands of hectares of Suriname’s primary forest might be under consideration for agriculture. Now, voices from all over the country are speaking out against it. “The government doesn’t communicate with the people in the forest. They don’t care about the well-being of the communities,” said Hugo Jabini, a human rights lawyer and member of the Saamaka tribe, which relies on the country’s forest for hunting and fishing. “They only focus on their own political benefit, their own family, their own economic interests.” Mongabay originally reported that approximately 354,836 hectares (876,819 acres) of land were being considered for agricultural use, requiring huge swaths of the rainforest to be cut down. But a new report from Monitoring of the Amazon Project (MAAP), performing a more rigorous analysis of Mongabay’s data, found that the area under consideration could be even larger than that — around 467,000 hectares (1,153,982 acres), of which 451,000 hectares (1,114,445 acres) is primary forest. It would be a shocking amount of deforestation, the report noted, for a country that has had an annual deforestation rate of just 6,560 hectares (16,210 acres) over the last two decades, some of the lowest on the continent. The map shows several local and Indigenous communities located…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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