Portugal's Fire Woes Aided By Bad Land Management, Non-Native Plantings

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LISBON - Poor land management has made it harder for firefighters in drought-stricken Portugal to tackle the country's worst forest fires in decades, experts said on Monday. Nearly 3,000 firefighters were battling 27 forest fires in central and northern Portugal on Monday, reinforced by aircraft from France and Spain and three helicopters from Germany.

So far this year, fires have killed at least 13 people and destroyed an estimated 134,500 hectares (337,000 acres) of forest, far above a yearly average of 110,000 hectares -- blazes made worse by the most severe drought in decades. Relatively more forest has burned in Portugal than in equally parched neighbouring Spain and in France this summer -- and experts say this is because of bad land management that makes fire prevention more difficult.

Portugal's biggest problem is the lack of a central registry of land ownership, said Domingos Cartaxo, a forest engineer with the Quercus environmental group. "Land registration is key," he said. "Many laws can be introduced, but if this structural question is not addressed, the fires will continue to burn." If there was a central registry, the authorities could identify forest owners and compel them to create fire walls of cleared land, or plant belts of fire-resistant tree species, making it much easier to prevent or control fires, he said.

Uncertainty over who owns land is made worse by the fact that many Portuguese are abandoning land they own in rural areas, meaning there is no one to monitor many of the country's forests. The planting of large areas of eucalyptus for paper and pulp in recent years has also contributed to the spread of forest fires because they burn more easily than many other species.

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