LIMA – The Peruvian government will pay Indian communities for their work in preserving the Amazon jungle as part of an ambitious program that seeks to protect 55 million hectares (212,000 square miles) of rain forest in the country, Environment Minister Antonio Brack told Efe.

Under the title “Let’s Conserve Together,” the project, which has already been approved by the Cabinet and will be implemented starting in 2010, plans to pay Amazon settlers 10 sols ($3.30) for every hectare – about 4 sols ($1.34) for every acre – of jungle they help to preserve, a figure that could increase if other countries help support the idea.

“If the idea is approved internationally at the coming 15th Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, it could obtain international support for conservation and we could as much as double that payment,” the minister said.

The German government has already contributed 5 million euros (about $7 million) to the program, while Japan has given Peru a credit of $40 million, which shows, Brack said, how important conservation of the Peruvian Amazon is for the rest of the world.

“One of the worst problems about global warming is that mankind in the last 500 years has destroyed 50 percent of forests on the planet and that is a very serious problem indeed,” the environment minister said, adding that in Peru 10 million hectares (39,000 square miles) of tropical forest have been destroyed.

“Up to now development has consisted of the woodland practice of slash and burn to clear land for crops and livestock, but that has given mediocre results because of the 10 million hectares (39,000 square miles) where that has been done, 8 million hectares (31,000 acres) are unproductive. It’s shameful and we can’t keep doing it,” Brack said.

For that reason, the goal of Peru’s Environment Ministry, created just over a year ago, is, according the minister, “to save these forests and at the same time see how we can give a basic income to these communities for the woodland they preserve.”

The Peruvian administration’s program is not limited to compensating native communities economically, but will also initiate other actions like employing 600 Indians as forest rangers to protect these areas, and to award scholarships so that natives can be trained in such activities as ecotourism and beekeeping.

“The day that standing forests are worth more to people because they produce wealth, they’re not going to cut them down,” Brack said, adding that this process consists of “changing the development system.”

The Peruvian jungle’s deforestation problem is the consequence, the minister said, of poor farmers migrating from the mountains to the Amazon in search of land, a colonization that has been promoted by the Peruvian government itself and has created grave problems.

“When the lumber was finished, they burned the jungle and the land lost its fertility, so they began growing a bush that did grow, the coca leaf,” Brack said, indicating another major problem in Peru – its role as the second largest producer of cocaine in the world.

The Peruvian minister added that the project is being coordinated with Indian organizations in order to avoid repeating the mistakes that became a breeding ground for last June’s protests that spiraled into clashes that left 24 police and 10 civilians dead.

For Brack, however, the violence in the jungle has had some positive repercussions: inhabitants of the capital, who in his opinion “live in a bubble,” now understand a little better that they have a jungle with a population that must be treated another way and not with the usual indifferent centralism.”

The fact is that the country, according to the minister, should be aware of the international responsibility it has as the fourth biggest country in the world in terms of tropical forests, which obliges it to fight to preserve them.

“Peru can contribute enormously to the world in preserving biodiversity, native cultures and forest management, and we’re laying down a big challenge to protect those forests, create wealth from them and not destroy them,” he said. EFE