Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest
deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for
life-threatening diseases.
There were an estimated ten million Indians living in the Amazonian Rainforest five centuries ago. Today there are less
than 200,000.
In Brazil alone, European colonists have destroyed more than 90 indigenous tribes since the 1900's. With them have
gone centuries of accumulated knowledge of the medicinal value of rainforest species. As their homelands continue to
be destroyed by deforestation, rainforest peoples are also disappearing.
Most medicin