Money and the environment: When the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing

World Bank Pledges to Save Trees, Then Helps Cut Down Amazon

By Daniel Howden, The Independent UK via AlterNet

A month ago it vowed to fight deforestation. Now research reveals it funds the rainforest's biggest threat.

The World Bank has emerged as one of the key backers behind an explosion of cattle ranching in the Amazon, which new research has identified as the greatest threat to the survival of the rainforest.

Ranching has grown by half in the last three years, driven by new industrial slaughterhouses which are being constructed in the Amazon basin with the help of the World Bank. The revelation flies in the face of claims from the bank that it is funding efforts to halt deforestation and reduce the massive greenhouse gas emissions it causes.

Roberto Smeraldi, head of Friends of the Earth Brazil and lead author of the new report, obtained exclusively by The Independent on Sunday, said the bank's contradictory policy on forests was now clear: "On the one hand you try and save the forest, on the other you give incentives for its conversion."

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