A lone tree remains standing in an area of the Amazon razed by illegal logging.

The region lost 6,450 square miles (16,700 square km) of woodland between 2005 and 2006, a decrease of 11 percent over the year before, the environment ministry said. It is the first significant fall in the rate of deforestation since 1997.

The ministry said studies also showed that destruction levels are expected to continue to fall this year, thanks to beefed-up enforcement of more stringent environmental regulations.

The environment ministry and federal police have recently carried out a series of highly publicized arrests of corrupt environmental protection agency agents accused of falsifying logging certificates to aid illegal logging operations.

Cattle ranching is the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. A relatively small number of large landowners have cleared vast sections of the rain forest for cattle pastureland since the 1970s. Enviornmentalists have said this was due to tax incentives that favored pastureland over natural forest.

Deforestation has slowed largely because the price of soybeans declined on the international market and Brazil䴜s currency strengthened against the dollar. That combination has made it far less profitable to cut down the rain forest to plant grain.

Greenpeace estimates three-quarters of rain forest logging has been illegal, as ranchers ignored regulations requiring landowners to leave 80 percent of forested areas untouched.