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The Amazon Forest is Disappearing Essay

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The Amazon Forest is Disappearing

Nine countries share the Amazon rain forest: Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia and Suriname. The Amazon forest is the largest rain forest ecosystem of the world (Brazil picks Amazon site for sustainable logging, 1998), with 5.5 million square kilometers (The Rape of the Amazon), where also live peasants and indigenous people.

The Amazon forest is source of great biodiversity and goods, which is really important for human being. It contains the “biggest and richest primeval forest in the world” and it represents more than 50% of the world’s rainforest, according to The Rape of the Amazon. The Amazon forest is “the most powerful and bio-actively diverse natural …show more content…

The cure of cancer or AIDS could be in the Amazon forest. From rain forest every year exotic plants to develop vaccines or cure for people is taken. According to Tuxill & Bright, (1998), 25% of the medicine used in the United States has chemical which come from wildlife and billions of rural people use plant and animal as natural medicine. Taylor reports that in the USA the sales of plant-base drugs were around $4.5 billion in 1980 and $40 billion in 1990 for worldwide. Dr. Varro E. Taylor, a pharmacognosist, cited by Morgan (1997), says that two-thirds of the modern medicine comes from plants in general, which can give us an idea of the of the amazon forest importance, considering that it represents 54% of the planet’s rain forest (Taylor).

However, despite these reasons widely known for preserving the Amazon, logging companies and shifting cultivation are destroying the Amazon forest. FOREST EXPLOTATION

According to Taylor, logging for wood exportation “is the single largest caused of rainforest destruction”, in addition to the production of fuel wood and charcoal and paper. He shows the Amazon case as prove of the logging destruction effect.

There are many valuable wood species, very appreciated by the logging companies, many of them associated to other harvesting activities. Bruno Manser-Fonds (1998) reports that many corporation, such Nestle, Pirelly, Mitsubichi and Marubeny, are responsible for deforestation and

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