Brazil's Green Party Friday has resigned from the governing coalition of Brazil to protest the near record speed with which the Amazon rain forest was being destroyed, dpa reported local media reports as saying Friday. The departure of the Green's small seven-member parliamentary fraction represented only a symbolic loss for the government of left- wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Culture Minister Gilberto Gil, who is a pop star, announced that the Greens would be fully independent in the future, dpa said. Earlier this week, the Environment Ministry announced that destruction of the rain forest in Brazil's Amazon Basin reached near record levels of 26,130 square kilometres between 2003 and 2004, a 6 per cent increase over the amount lost in the previous year, despite Lula's pledge to protect and recover the Amazon ecology. The figure represented more than one quarter of the world's 94,000 square kilometres of forest estimated in a recent United Nations report to disappear every year. Environmental groups blamed Lula's government and its inconsequential policies for the destruction. "Lula's government has absolutely failed in his pledge to stop the destruction," said Michael Evers, head of the forestry branch of the environmental group WWF in Germany. ---SP 2304 Local Time 2004 GMT
