Even before a report came out Tuesday alleging that illicit deals gave a quarter of all of Liberia to foreign logging companies, Liberia’s president suspended her forestry chief and promised to investigate.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf tried to get ahead of the report, which alleges that the country's "private use permits" have been usurped over the last two years to allow commercial logging. 

"The private use permits have been considered in the past to assist communities in terms of job creation, in terms of support and benefit, but the truth is, we are finding out also, that it has been abused and it is unacceptable," Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown said in comments reported by The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Moreover, the head of Liberia's Forestry Authority, Moses Wogbeh, is under investigation into an allegation that he violated a moratorium on land permits for commercial logging, presidential spokesman Jerolinmek Piah told The Associated Press on Monday.  

Wogbeh was suspended from his post over the weekend and Liberia said it would bar illegally-logged timber from being exported. 

---

The advocacy groups Global Witness, Save My Future Foundation and Sustainable Development Institute produced the report.

"A quarter of Liberia's total landmass has been granted to logging companies in just two years, following an explosion in the use of secretive and often illegal logging permits," the groups said in a statement.

Corruption is seen as a big obstacle to development in Liberia, which remains one of the world's least developed countries nearly a decade after the end of a 14-year civil war.

The government has been struggling to clarify land ownership issues across its vast forested zones, traditionally divided along ethnic lines.

Global Witness said about 26,000 square kilometers of land had been granted to timber companies through at least 66 private use permits -- lightly regulated deals between timber companies and private land owners.

It said many of the deals made with individuals said to own the land were backed by land deeds held in the collective name of people of a district or clan who had little knowledge of the accords and would reap little benefit from the timber exported.

The advocacy group added that some of the deals appeared to have been backed by forged documents. "When presented with a letter written in his name submitting his people's deed to the government, a Paramount Chief (clan chief) from the Dugbeh River Private Use Permit area in Sinoe County told us that the letter was forged," Global Witness said.

Land deeds in Liberia require a presidential signature.

In another deal, Global Witness said, the deed bore the signature of former President Edwin Barclay, but was dated six years before he came to power.

Johnson Sirleaf, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her work for women's rights, has been facing growing criticism for failing to root out government-level corruption as the country begins potentially lucrative iron ore exports and explores for oil offshore.

Last month she suspended her son from his position as Deputy Central Bank Governor as well as 45 other government officials for failing to declare their assets to anti-corruption authorities, a move observers said was intended to show she is serious about fighting graft.

The president has been criticized for nominating three sons to high level posts in her administration - the one at the central bank, one at the national oil company, and one at the head of the country's national security agency.

Logging has been a controversial issue in Liberia since the civil war, when rebels used proceeds from timber to purchase weapons, triggering a U.N. ban. The ban was lifted after Liberia's foreign partners, particularly the United States and the World Bank, helped it reform its forestry laws. 

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

More world stories from NBC News:

• Chinese media: 'Many Chinese people dislike Hillary'
• In parts of China, BYO school supplies include desks
• Pistorious sorry for timing, not content, of Paralympics outburst
• 77-year-old Japanese man asks US mayor to look for items lost in tsunami
• Sun Myung Moon, founder of Unification Church, dies at 92
• Girl accused of blasphemy in Pakistan may have been framed by Muslim cleric

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

OSLO, Norway -- Animals living in patches of rainforest cut off from bigger expanses of jungle by farms, roads or towns are dying off faster than previously thought, according to an academic study published Tuesday.

"We uncovered a staggering rate of local extinctions," the British and Brazilian researchers wrote in the online science journal PLOS ONE.

---

They visited 196 fragments of what was once a giant, intact forest in eastern Brazil on the Atlantic coast, now broken up by decades of deforestation to make way for agriculture.

Each isolated forest patch, ranging from less than the size of a soccer field to more than 12,000 acres, had on average only four of 18 types of the mammals the experts surveyed, including howler monkeys and marmosets.

White-lipped peccaries, similar to pigs, "were completely wiped out and jaguars, lowland tapirs, woolly spider monkeys and giant anteaters were virtually extinct," the British and Brazilian scientists said of their findings.

'It's going to be wild': Brazilians party as focus shifts to Rio Olympics

'Bad news for conservation'
Normal estimates of declining wildlife numbers, based on the size of isolated forest fragments, predicted higher survival rates, it said. But they had underestimated continuing human pressures such as hunting and fires.

"This is bad news for conservation," Professor Carlos Peres, of Britain's University of East Anglia, told Reuters. Many animals had vanished even in what seemed big areas of forest with intact tree canopy, he said.

PhotoBlog: Brazil backslides on protecting the Amazon

The rate of species loss in the area studied -- the Atlantic Forest region which covers 95,000 square miles, the size of Britain or the state of Michigan, was likely to be mirrored in other countries such as Indonesia, Ghana or Madagascar, Peres said.

Plea for parks
The scientists urged better conservation.

In Brazil, animals survived best in five forest remnants that were protected as parks. "This paper is a very big positive endorsement of more protected areas," Peres said.

More Environment coverage on NBCNews.com

Measures to place an economic value on forests could help, he said. Peres gave the example of preserving forests as part of a fight against climate change.

Forests absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow and release it when they burn or rot. Between 12 and 20 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, most of which come from burning fossil fuels, are caused by deforestation.

Complete World news coverage on NBCNews.com

Almost 200 countries are looking into ways to protect forests through a U.N. program called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) that would put a price on carbon stored in trees in developing countries. One example would be to bring forests into carbon trading systems.

Peres said that "degradation" in U.N. jargon referred mainly to logging but should be expanded to cover threats to wildlife.

"My mission is to put wildlife and biodiversity into that second 'D' of REDD," he said.

More world stories from NBC News:

• 1,000 suicides linked to hard economic times in Britain?
• Dozens killed in Afghan suicide bomber attacks
• Study: Japan nuclear disaster caused mutated butterflies
• Restaurateur claims Games cost her business $140,000
• On to Sochi: Virtual tour of the next Olympic city
• Will world inaction help al-Qaida gain foothold in Syria?
• Analysis: Egypt's Morsi shows he's a force to be reckoned with
• Vatican says the 'butler did it,' orders trial
• Olympic heroes turn tourists as London 2012 end nears
• Mormon church brings in $7 billion a year from tithing

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Brazil's Senate passed a landmark reform of the country's land law on Tuesday, infuriating environmentalists who say it could spark a new wave of deforestation in the Amazon region.

The new so-called Forest Code relaxes requirements on the amount of forest coverage farmers must maintain on their properties, a change that producers in the agricultural powerhouse say is needed to end years of legal uncertainty.

---

The Senate approved the basic text of the bill late Tuesday, leaving dozens of proposed amendments to be voted on later.

The government says environmentalists' fears are mostly unfounded and that strict enforcement of the new rules will result in the restoration of 24 million hectares of forest, equal to the size of the United Kingdom.

Debate over the changes to the law first proposed a decade ago has pitted green campaigners who oppose what they see as an amnesty on environmental crimes against a powerful farming lobby that says Brazil needs more space to produce food as exports rise.

Brazil is the world's top producer of coffee, sugar, beef and orange juice and a major producer of soy and corn. Expansion of cattle and soy farming has been the biggest driver of destruction of the world's largest forest in recent years.

The law is now expected to be approved by the lower house of Congress and sent to President Dilma Rousseff, who is likely to sign it into law despite calls from environmental groups for her to veto the bill.

Rousseff pledged during her election campaign last year not to allow deforestation to rise. Signing the bill would put her government's international image at risk ahead of the major "Rio+20" environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro next June.

But she is able to point to several elements of the new law the government says ensure there will be no amnesty on illegal deforestation and no surge in destruction.

Under the new code, thousands of the country's farmers who had removed forest coverage on their property beyond the limits of the previous legislation must sign up to a 20-year plan to replace the missing coverage.

Here are the key features of the new forest code:

Reduction in forest coverage requirements
Brazil has required rural landowners to maintain a minimum amount of forest coverage on their properties for decades, ranging from 20 percent in the southeast to 35 percent for inland savannah areas to 80 percent in the Amazon.

Those percentages are unchanged but growers can now count mandatory coverage of river margins and steep hillsides toward this acreage, reducing the total amount owners with such land will have to preserve.

In a limited number of cases where it is shown to be in the public interest, forest coverage on hillsides can be replaced with other types of vegetation.

Exemption for smaller farms
Properties of between 20 and 400 hectares, depending on the region, will be exempt from any requirement to replace missing forest coverage but are prohibited from any further deforestation. The government says properties in this category make up less than a quarter of total farm land.

A further exemption from the minimum reserve requirements will be made for those who bought an area of land when the law required a smaller area of compulsory coverage. They will have to maintain only the coverage that was required at the time.

Fines suspended, two decades to replace missing trees
Growers who have removed forest beyond the legal minimum, or who were caught out by past changes to these limits must sign up to government programs for the gradual restoration of missing trees over two decades. Fines landowners would face over missing coverage are suspended until this is done, and scrapped once these obligations are fully met.

Rent or replace
Producers will from now on also have the option of renting or buying a nearby patch of forested land should they not wish to replace forest cover on their own property.

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.