ROME: The world’s forests are reduced by some 13 million hectares each year but the rate of loss is slowing down, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has said. “Deforestation continues at an alarming rate,” the Rome-based organisation said in its Global Forest Resources Assessment, issued after a five-year survey.

FAO said net loss of forest area between 2000 and 2005 was 7.3 million hectares a year — an area about the size of Sierra Leone or Panama — but that was down from some 8.9 million hectares a year between 1990 and 2000.

FAO said the rate of loss was slowing thanks to new planting and natural forest expansion.

It said new forests and trees were being planted at increasing rates but they still accounted for less than five per cent of all the world’s forest areas.

The report, covering 229 countries and territories, was the most comprehensive assessment to date of the world’s forest resources, FAO said.

It said forests now covered nearly 4 billion hectares, some 30 per cent of the world’s land masses, but added that only 10 countries accounted for two-thirds of all forest area.

They were listed as Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Indonesia, Peru, Russia and the United States.

South America suffered the largest net loss of forests between 2000 and 2005 — around 4.3 million hectares per year — followed by Africa, which lost 4 million hectares annually.—Reuters