LISBON (AFP) - Portugal said it would spend 200 million euros (250 million dollars) over the next three years to reforest the record amount of land which was destroyed during a wave of summer wildfires that killed 20 people.

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Agriculture Minister Armando Sevinate Pinto told a news conference the money would enable to government to plant trees in up to 60 percent of the 280,000 hectares of forest which were ravaged by the flames that swept across the country between late July and mid-September.

The government estimates the fires, which destroyed some 100 homes as well as thousands of kilometres (miles) of electrical and telephone wires, caused more than one billion euros (dollars) in damage.

The minister said the government would also spend 50 million euros to help farmers replace lost agriculture equipment and fix damage done to state parks.

He added funds would be alloted at a later date on a fire prevention campaign so that "the public realizes the value of forests and the terrible impact that fires cause."

Firefighters say many blazes are caused each summer by drivers who throw cigarette butts out of windows while driving through forests or by farmers and hikers who set fires to burn garbage that then got out of hand.

Forestry experts also blame absentee landowners, who do not clear their plots of dry wood and brush, as well as outdated property registers and an emphasis on the planting of highly combustible eucalyptus trees for the high number of wildfires.

Portugal's 3.3 million hectares (8.25 million acres) of forests are split among 600,000 property owners, many of them with plots of only a few hectares.

A great majority of the small plots belong to elderly people who can no longer care for the land, or to people who have moved to the cities which dot the coast and no longer have any interest in their woodland holdings.

The forest and wood products industry represents over three percent of the Portugal's gross domestic product and accounts for 11 percent of the nation's exports.