More than 43 million hectares of forest -- an area bigger than Germany -- have been lost in a little over a decade in just a handful of deforestation hotspots, conservation organisation WWF said yesterday. Swathes of forest continue to be flattened each year -- mainly due to industrial-scale agriculture -- as biodiversity-rich areas are cleared to create space for livestock and crops. Analysis by WWF found that just 29 sites across South America, Africa and South East Asia were responsible for more than half of the global forest loss. The Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, the Bolivian Amazon, Paraguay, Argentina, Madagascar, along with Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia and Malaysia were among the worst affected, it said.  Forests are an enormous carbon sink, together with other vegetation and soil sucking up roughly a third of all the carbon pollution humans produce annually. Yet they continue to disappear rapidly, threatening irreparable losses to Earth's crucial biodiversity.