More than 32 million acres of forest, an area roughly the size of Greece or Panama, are destroyed by deforestation each year, equaling a net loss of about 0.18 percent of the world's forest annually, the Food and Agriculture Organization said Monday. But new planting and the natural expansion of existing forests has slowed deforestation since 2000 from 22 million to 18 million acres per year.

"While good progress is being made in many places, unfortunately forest resources are still being lost or degraded at an alarmingly high rate," said the FAO's Hosny El-Lakany.

The deforestation was blamed primarily on natural disasters and conversion of land for agricultural use, the report said. The highest rates of deforestation occurred in South America, with losses of 10.6 million acres over the past five years, and Africa, with 9.8 million acres lost since 2000.

Net forest growth continued in Europe, but showed signs of slowing after expansion during the 1990s. The greatest forest growth was reported from Asia, where net gains of about 2.47 million acres of forest land were attributed to mass replanting efforts by China.

"There are reasons to be very optimistic about what is happening," said El-Lakany.

China enacted a ban on all domestic logging in 1998 following flooding along the Yangtze and Yellow rivers which the government blamed in part on deforestation. China has since relied on imported timber from Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, Malaysia and Gabon to fuel its massive building and manufacturing needs, a move that has draw criticism from international environmental groups.

"China is by far the largest importer of rainforest destruction in the world," said Greenpeace International forests campaigner Phil Aikman. "For every ten tropical logs shipped from the world's threatened rainforests, five are destined for China."

In addition to precipitating flooding, deforestation can exacerbate mudslides like those that killed more than 800 people in Guatemala following Hurricane Stan in October.

Overgrazing and tree cutting spawned similar mudslides in northern Pakistan after an Oct. 8 earthquake killed 73,000 people. These "ecological landmines," as some call the slides, are expected to continue as locals scavenging for fuel and building supplies glean hillsides.

Environmental advocates criticized the FOA report for considering net gains and losses of forest size only, not accounting for the destruction of virgin forest land each year.

"It is a global disgrace that, after decades of concern about the world's declining forests, the United Nations still can't even produce an accurate assessment of how much forest is actually left," says Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation in Britain.

Primary forests, which are ecologically untouched by human interference, comprise up to 36 percent of all global forests, and are destroyed at a rate of 14.8 million acres per year. FOA officials said the extent of damage inside these individual forest ecosystems was impossible to judge and warned against excessive apprehension.

"It is obviously very sad to lose this amount, but you should bear in mind that it represents just 0.4 percent of total primary forest," said FOA survey co-coordinator, Mette Loyche Wilkie.

About 30 percent of the earth's land surface is covered by forests, mostly in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Indonesia, Peru, Russia and the United States, and around 1.6 billion people worldwide depend on forests for their livelihood. Up to 10,000 endangered plant species are found in these forests and one third of such woodlands are used by people to produce paper, wood, rubber, and other products.

The study by Rome-based FOA found 11 percent of all forests are protected by ecological preserves and an additional 237 million acres have been preserved since 1990.

The FAO report said forests are vital to the earth's well-being because they serve as carbon sinks, absorbing twice as many greenhouse gases, blamed for eating at the protective ozone layer, as does the planet's atmosphere.

The FOA reported the study was the most exhaustive of its kind, compiling 15 years of data from 229 countries. About 800 researchers around the globe contributed to the study and countries provided their own official data. A full report was to be released by the FOA in Januawry 2006.

"The outcome of this global partnership is better data, a more transparent reporting process and enhanced capacity to analyze and report on forests and forest resources," said Wilkie.

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