Fernando Silva shook his head as he watched two lumberjacks cut through what remained of his small pine forest in the south of Portugal. "Those trees were a good source of income and now they are gone," 60-year-old Silva said, looking away. Silva is unlucky.

His valley lies in the way of the government's efforts to cut a 430 km (267 mile) corridor through Portugal's central and southern forests to contain a plague of microscopic worm-like organisms that are killing pine trees and threatening to spread throughout the nation's forests and beyond. Pine Wilt Nematode was first detected in Portugal in 1999, but has spread at an alarming rate recently.

The EU has offered Portugal up to 8 million euros (US$10.64 million) to control the plague and Portugal's government has said that the drastic measures should help control the spread of nematodes. The corridor is meant to contain the pests inside 2.47 million acres (1 million hectares) of land, or about one ninth of Portugal's total forest, and stop them from spreading elsewhere in Europe. European Union inspectors visited the country a few weeks ago to check the situation.

"If only they would have spared the healthy ones," said Silva, adding that he had planned to sell some of his pine trees to a wood panel factory. But the government has blamed landowners for failing to destroy infected trees in time to stop the disease from spreading further. Recent droughts have also helped spread the blight as it weakened trees' defences.

And some landowners have not been as resigned to the government measures as Silva. "One pointed a rifle at me and told me to leave immediately," said Rogerio Rocha, a lumberjack who was hired by the government to help cut the forest corridor. Despite the resistance, the government expects to complete the corridor by the end of the month -- before insects emerging in the warm spring months begin to spread the organisms again.

"Doing nothing would result in an embargo on Portugal's pinewood exports to the rest of European Union, which is an extremely important source of revenue for Portugal," Agriculture Minister Jaime Silva told Reuters. Portugal's cork, pulp and pine wood exports account for about 2.5 billion euros (US$3.30 billion) a year. The corridor will also help Portugal control fires that have raged across the country in recent years, he said.

But it will also cost this small Iberian country about 500,000 pine trees to create the corridor. Landowners complain that the 4-10 euros the government is offering for every healthy pine tree it destroys is not enough. "I have pine trees 45 years old that are worth about 24 euros. The money is just not enough," said Pedro Silveira, who heads an association of forest owners in the south of Portugal and has three of his properties affected by the corridor. Bursaphelenchus xylophilus feeds on the cells lining the resin canals of the tree and multiplies very rapidly. As they destroy the resin canal cells, the tree's water-moving system becomes clogged. The tree then wilts and dies within weeks.

The pest is thought to have arrived in Portugal by sea eight years ago, and caught authorities by surprise when it infected more than 300,000 trees last year, twice the number in 2005. The government says the compensation offered to landowners is fair and that it is better to sacrifice some pine trees now rather than lose them all in the future. "Landowners complain they are losing their pine trees but we say it is better to lose some trees now than lose all of them later," Jaime Silva said.
(Por Henrique Almeida, Planet Ark, 21/03/2007)