KAMPUCHEA

-- (Credit: Rustam Vania)Kampuchea's
logging concession to an
Indonesian company -
which covers nearly 19 per
cent of the country's remaining forest - has raised the
spectre of an environmental
disaster in southeast Asia. To
counter the ill-effects of
logging, King Nordorn
Sihanouk called on logging
companies to plant three
trees for each one felled and
warned that Kampuchea
faced a future as a 'desert' if
deforestation did not end.

The desertification of
other countries in the region
is also a major source of
worry. In . Thailand, the
Philippines and Vietnam, the
amount of forest cover has
declined by at least 30 per
cent in the past 40 years,
according to surveys. "An
environmental disaster is in
the making if rainforests in
the region are being
unscrupulously destroyed,"
says T C Cheng, a conservation officer at the Hong
Kong office of Friends of the
Earth, the international environment group.