Eat chocolates - and save the Brazilian rainforest?

[acmavm]

http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=4675&fcategory_desc=Environment

<snip>

Maybe you can wolf down those chocolates you got for Christmas with a clear conscience after all. For, though they may do your waistline no good, they might just helpto save the world.

Most of the chocolate that comes from Brazil, a major producer and exporter- and some from other nations - is helping to preserve endangered rainforest, a new report published here reveals. And, the report says, with proper development, "forest chocolate" could rescue one of the world's most crucial and most threatened wildlife areas.

The area is Brazil's Atlantic Forest, which runs along the country's coast, from its eastern-most point near Recife to close to the Uruguayan border. It is among the richest ecosystems on the planet: 476 tree species have been found in a single hectare of the forest, compared to a typical 15 or 20 in temperate woodlands such as those in Britain or North America. The Worldwatch Institute, which produced the report, says that parts of the forest boast "the highest level of tree species diversity ever recorded anywhere on earth."

Yet it is also in far greater jeopardy than the much more celebrated Amazon rainforest, the focus of countless environmental campaigns. Only about seven per cent of its original extent remains, and it has been reduced to a green archipelago of forest fragments.

-MORE-

[citizen snips]

1. I will go and eat some chocolate now.

n/t