Buying the rainforest

IT’S the new way to save the rainforest: BUY IT! Frank Field, the former government minister, is joining forces with a Tory benefactor to sell plots of rainforest over the internet.

Under the scheme that Field has devised with Johan Eliasch, the millionaire businessman, the public will be offered the chance to pay for small plots of the rainforest. They will then be able to impose a ban on logging which contributes to global warming.

Writing in News Review this weekend, Field says the project, called Cool Earth, will give people the chance to “leapfrog the clanking machinery of government”.

He writes: “Our aim, by the end of this year, is to have launched an international trust that will allow every individual to ‘own’ and protect part of the world’s rainforest. Microchips will be placed in the trees so that satellites can locate our individual part of the forest and show it on our laptops when we tap in a code.”

Field came up with the idea of Cool Earth when he read a Sunday Times article last March revealing how Eliasch, chief executive of the Head sports equipment company and deputy treasurer of the Conservative party, had bought 400,000 acres of the Amazon forest. He acquired it from a logging company to protect the plants and wildlife.

Eliasch, the son of a Swedish industrialist, is estimated to have paid about £8m for the land. He believes the entire Amazon basin could be bought for less than £30 billion.