(AFP) – Nov 12, 2009

BRASILIA — Brazil's sprawling Amazon jungle this year lost 7,000 square kilometers (2,700 square miles) of rain forest, a huge area but also a whopping 45 percent drop from 2008 losses, an official reported Thursday.

"It's by far the best result we've seen since INPE began its study in 1988," the director of Brazil's National Institute of Space Research, Gilberto Camara, told President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his environment minister at a meeting here.

Camara said deforestation in the Amazon basin has "fallen significantly" and steadily since 2004, when some 27,000 square kilometers (10,400 square miles) of forest disappeared.

Between July 2008 and July 2009 deforestation claimed 7,000 square kilometers, compared to 12.900 square kilometers (5,000 square miles) in the previous 12-month period, Camara said.

INPE's estimates have a 10-percent margin of error, he added.

The steady drop in deforestation is partly attributed to the "Arco Verde-Terra Legal" program that brings together 43 Amazon localities to practice sustainable farming, and regulates land transfers in the Amazon basin.

Lula's administration has made deforestation control the centerpiece of its fight against global warming and aims to reduce clearing in the Amazon by as much as 80 percent by 2020.

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