Rainforests are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Today, roughly 1.5 acres (think bigger than a football field) of rainforest are destroyed every second. If deforestation continues at its current rate, the world's tropical rainforests will be wiped out within 40 years!

So why are we killing the forests? Some would say it's because we can't see the forest for the trees.

Many only see the immediate results of using these lands, rather than the benefits of preserving them for the future. People are cutting down the rainforests for three major resources: land for crops, lumber for paper and other wood products and land for livestock pastures. Most experts agree that we're losing much more than we're getting. There are several things involved in this assessment.

First, the land in rainforests isn't all that great for crops and livestock. And once the forest is cleared, it's even less so. The soil is so infertile that it's nearly useless for growing anything. Generally, when people clear-cut a forest, they can only use the land for a year or two before the nutrients from the original plants are depleted. This leaves behind a huge, barren tract of land.

Cutting large sections of rainforest provide lumber right now. But in the long run, it actually shrinks the world's lumber supply. Experts say that we should preserve most of the rainforests and harvest them only on a small scale. This way, we maintain a self-replenishing supply of lumber for the future.

Did you know? Roughly, 80 percent of the food we eat originally came from tropical rainforests. Without rainforests, we wouldn't have the seeds that produce coffee and chocolate. Other rainforest foods include tomatoes, potatoes, rice, bananas, black pepper, pineapples and corn.

And finally, the most important reason against deforestation is life, itself. Rainforests are often called the world's pharmacy. [insert rosy periwinkle sentence here] More than 25 percent of the medicines we use today come from plants originating in rainforests. And there's probably a lot more to come. Not even 1 percent of rainforest plants have been examined for their medicinal properties. There's a good chance that our best shot at curing cancer, AIDS and many other diseases lies somewhere in the world's diminishing rainforests. But we could be losing those medicines by the minute -- some 137 rainforest species disappear every day.

The world's rainforests are an extremely valuable natural resource -- but not for their lumber or their land. They are the main cradle of life on Earth, and they hold millions of unique life forms that we have yet to discover. Destroying the rainforests is comparable to destroying an unknown planet. We have no idea what we're losing.

Country	Annual rate of change / deforestation (total forest lost) 1990 - 2000
Argentina	lost 0.8% (285,000 hectares)
Australia
Bangladesh
Belize
Brazil
Burundi
Cote d'Ivoire
Ecuador
Guatemala
Nicaragua
Niger
Rwanda
Sierra Leone
Sri Lanka
Viet Nam
Zambia