NOT SO CLEAR CUT.

In the year to July 2018, Brazil lost 790,000 hectares of rainforest, a 13.7 per cent rise on the previous year and the worst annual deforestation figures in a decade. Deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon fell by 70 per cent between 2005 and 2015 (though this still meant more forest was lost each year). Fines for illegal deforestation this year are down 34 per cent year on year; government seizures of illegally harvested timber fell precipitously, with just 40 cubic metres, equal to just ten large trees, confiscated in the first four months of 2019 (25,000 cubic metre of illegal timber was seized in 2018). Yet the activity in the Congo rainforest appears to reinforce this point; that the business model that produces palm oil, soya, timber, paper and pulp, far from being restructured by multinational companies, still has plenty of life in it. [Extracted from the article]