The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) announced Thursday $20 million in seed money for a fund to change farming, mining and other practices contributing to the rapid decline of the Amazon.

IDB president Mauricio Claver-Carone announced the starting contribution from the bank's own capital at its annual meeting in Barranquilla, Colombia.

He said the fund would focus on the "bioeconomy", with "new models of sustainable agriculture and livestock farming given that current ones encourage deforestation."

Forty-eight IDB member countries are attending the assembly, mainly by videoconference, after it was postponed twice from March 2020 due to the coronavirus epidemic.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, which contains a large part of the Amazon, welcomed the funding in an address to the virtual gathering, and urged "efficiency" in the plan's execution.

"With few international resources available to developing countries, we need projects funded by the fund to ensure positive results without delay," he said, according to a translation.

According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Latin America was the region hardest hit by deforestation in the last decade due to the expansion of farming, road construction, mining activity and forest fires.

The Amazon, which encompasses the world's largest rainforest, stretches over nine South American countries and contains one of ten known species on Earth.

According to official data, the Brazilian Amazon shrunk by 8,426 square kilometers in 2020, though some experts think the number is much higher.

For its part, Colombia saw some 1,590 sq km of forest destroyed, two-thirds of it in the Amazon, according to 2019 figures.

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