Less than a month after Colombia enacted a sweeping timber-development law, President Álvaro Uribe agreed to send the measure back to Congress for revisions, bowing to criticism that it would open vast tracts of the nation’s primary forest to commercial logging. Uribe announced the move on Jan. 12, following talks with four former environment ministers who opposed the legislation. In doing so, he pledged he would ask Congress to focus the law’s incentives exclusively on commercial tree plantations, eliminating its incentives for logging in primary forests. One of the former ministers who met with Uribe said the president also promised that once Congress acted, he would issue decrees providing more explicit protections for the country’s 158 million acres (64 million has) of primary forest... [Log in to read more]