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  PlanetArk 5 Jun 07
Indonesia's Forests Threatened by Logging, Palm Oil
Story by Mita Valina Liem

PlanetArk 29 May 07
Palm Oil Puts Squeeze on Asia's Endangered Orangutan

PALANGKARAYA, Central Kalimantan - Bound hand and foot, dishevelled orangutans caught raiding Borneo's oil palm crops silently await their fate as a small crowd of plantation workers gather to watch.

Lacking only hand-cuffs and finger-printing to complete the atmosphere of a criminal bust, such "ape evictions" have become part of life for Asia's endangered red apes.

Thousands have strayed into the path of international commerce as Indonesia and Malaysia, their last remaining habitats, race to convert their forests to profitable palm crops.

Branded pests for venturing out from their diminishing forest habitats into plantations where they eat young palm shoots, orangutans could be extinct in the wild in ten years time, the United Nations said in March.

Fighting against this grim prediction is the Nyaru Menteng Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) centre in Central Kalimantan, which rescues orangutans and returns them to the wild at the cost of US$3,000 per ape.

"They will kill the animals if we don't go ... It's cheaper to kill the orangutan than put up a fence or snares," said Lone Droscher-Nielsen, the Danish-born founder of the centre.

While harming the apes is illegal, her centre has amassed a slew of photographs of the grisly fates of some plantation trespassers: Apes with their hands cut off and slashed to death with machetes, and others with bullets through their foreheads.

With dozens captured this year, cages are full, and finding secure land for releases is a constant challenge for the centre.

"It's not just orangutans -- bears, gibbons -- everybody is losing their home," said Droscher-Nielsen. "If it was only the orangutan, people just say: 'Well it's only one species that's going to go extinct'. But it's not just one species. Those forests have millions of animals in them that are all going to go extinct if we continue".

SQUEEZED OUT

Indonesia and Malaysia together produce 83 percent of the world's palm oil. Made by crushing fresh fruit, the reddish-brown oil is riding high in the commodities charts, with crude prices up over 15 percent this year after rising 40 percent in 2006.

Used in cookies, toothpaste, ice cream and breads it is the world's second most popular edible oil after soy. Demand is also soaring for palm oil-derived biofuel, despite objections from critics who slam the "green" alternative to pricey crude oil as "deforestation diesel" because of the destruction wreaked on forests to make way for palm plantations.

Of 6.5 million hectares cultivated in Malaysia and Indonesia in 2004, almost four million hectares was previously forest, environment group Friends of the Earth calculated.

For orangutan, the clearances are a matter of life and death.

"You can see how desperate the situation is", said forestry department official Sugianto, 43, as he gestured at row after row of palms in the ape's last stronghold, Central Kalimantan.

"The company knows the orangutan has a protected status ... if they have a permit to clear 60,000 hectares they clear 60,000 hectares, orangutan or not. They only care about their profit".

Caught and reported to the Borneo Orangutan Survival centre by plantations who say they are trying to be responsible stakeholders, healthy animals are re-released deep in the forest. Those too injured or too young to survive alone join 600 others at the rehabilitation centre.

Forty local Dayak women look after the current crop of 18 palm oil "orphans," whose mothers have been killed; bottle-feeding them milk, administering medicine and supervising their climbing and nest-building.

"Some people still think it is a strange job, but others think it is normal now," said 31-year old Sukawati. After "forest school," the apes graduate to eventual release. "They are cute and funny," said Sukawati. "They make me laugh".

BALANCING ACT

Orangutans once ranged across Southeast Asia. Now an estimated 7,300 remain on Indonesia's Sumatra island and 50,000 on Borneo island. An estimated 5,000 disappear every year.

Decades of habitat loss through rampant illegal logging, lethal annual forest fires, and poachers who earn hundreds of dollars for capturing orangutans for the illegal pet trade have all taken their toll.

But this latest threat is the worst, experts said. "The orangutans can withstand a certain degree of logging, as most loggers don't take the orangutan food trees," said Bhayu Pamungkas of the World Wide Fund for Nature. "But they have no chance with oil palm - there's no chance for the orangutan if they clear-cut all the forest".

To rescue the industry's green credentials, several Indonesian and Malaysian palm oil companies have joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), whose voluntary criteria include a ban on clearing primary forests and areas of high conservation value, such as forests containing orangutan.

Its more than 150 members also include major European end-users like Cadbury-Schweppes, Unilever and the Body Shop, that together take 40 percent of Asian exports, and who want to buy non-destructive palm oil.

But securing private sector support is a balancing act, said Fitrian Ardiansyah, 32, an RSPO board member.

"There is some genuine intention from progressive companies to distinguish between them and the bad guys," he said. "But if the push is too hard for them it's not going to be too difficult to switch the market to China and India, and emerging markets like the Middle East and Africa".

TREES AND PRIORITIES

Like whales, pandas, polar bears, and tigers, shaggy orange orangutan are classed "charismatic megafauna" by academics - endangered animals whose plight provokes compassion and concern.

Cute as they may be, their supporters need to keep perspective, said Derom Bangun, executive chairman of Gapki, the Indonesian Palm Oil Association, and an RSPO member.

"We should see the whole picture, not only the orangutan. They try to manipulate emotional side of orangutans so that housewives in Europe find it very pitiful," he said.

The country's clearance of almost 1.9 million hectares of forest a year between 2000 and 2005, Asia's worst deforestation rate, also needs to be seen in its economic context, Bangun said.

While the government does need to better define which forest areas are to be preserved, not all will be kept, he said.

"Other countries chopped down their forests when they were developing their countries. If they would like us to preserve more than we can, they should do something to help us."

But while plantation workers have some choice whether they want to buy into the motorbikes and mobile phones offered by palm's economic opportunities, orangutans have no such choice, those on the front-line point out.

"I'm not against palm oil," said Droscher-Nielsen. "(But) if there's not proper protection of the forest the orangutans are not going to make it."

(Additional reporting by Mita Valina Liem in Jakarta) Story by Gillian Murdoch

PlanetArk 5 Jun 07
Indonesia's Forests Threatened by Logging, Palm Oil
Story by Mita Valina Liem

JAKARTA - It's one of the few countries that still has vast swathes of tropical rainforests left. But conservationists say maybe not for long. Indonesia's rainforests -- especially those on Borneo island -- are being stripped so rapidly because of illegal logging and palm oil plantations for bio-fuels, they could be wiped out altogether within the next 15 years, some environmentalists say.

"Sixty percent of the protected and conservation areas are already badly damaged due to illegal logging and palm oil plantations," Rully Sumada, a forestry expert with Indonesian environmental group Walhi, told Reuters.

"The deforestation speed is 2.8 million hectares a year. At this rate, by 2012 the forests in Sumatra, Borneo and Sulawesi will be gone, only the forests in Papua will be left. And if cutting of trees carries on, no forest will be left by 2022."

Indonesia has a total forest area of more than 225 million acres (91 million hectares), or about 10 percent of the world's remaining tropical forest, according to Rainforestweb.org, a portal on rainforests (www.rainforestweb.org).

But the tropical Southeast Asian country -- whose forests are a treasure trove of plant and animal species including the endangered orangutans -- has already lost an estimated 72 percent of its original frontier forest.

The biggest threat to the forests of Borneo, and also Aceh on the northernmost tip of Sumatra island, is from illegal logging.

A recent report by the Environmental Investigation Agency and Indonesia-based Telapak said that Malaysia and China were major recipients of stolen Indonesian timber and that shipping companies from Singapore carried such wood overseas.

CHINA INDUSTRY COMPLICIT

Greenpeace's China office said China's timber industry was complicit in the illegal felling of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea's merbau trees, with logs then smuggled to China and processed and exported as floorboards and high-end furnishings to the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe.

Merbau is a resilient red hardwood, one of the most valuable in Southeast Asia. China's Foreign Ministry brushed away accusations that the country's demand for timber was hastening the destruction of Southeast Asian forests, saying it had a strict system of supervision and management of timber and timber product imports."

"The effects of deforestation are crystal clear. Bio-diversity will be destroyed," Masnellyarti Hilman, a deputy minister in Indonesia's environment ministry, told Reuters.

"Not to mention floods, landslides. We see them as a result of massive deforestation by people who do not care about its impact. Although they actually know that one of the conditions to fulfil before cutting trees down is to re-plant, some do, some don't."

ORANGUTANS IN PERIL

Environmentalists say Indonesia has also lost vast amounts of forest land to feed growing global demand for bio-fuels as an alternative source of energy.

The world's second largest palm oil producer already has around 5 million hectares of land planted with oil palm and the government aims to develop between 2-3 million hectares more of oil plantations nationwide by 2010.

Environmentalists say the slash-and-burn technique used to speed up the clearing of land for plantations sends huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and is also destroying several endangered species such as the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger.

According to a recent U.N report compiled using new satellite images and Indonesian government data, orangutan habitat is being lost 30 percent quicker than was previously feared.

It was estimated in 2002 about 60,000 of the shaggy ginger primates were left in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra. Some ecologists say the number has now been halved and others say the species could be extinct in 20 years.

Indonesia says government policy is to preserve virgin forest and expand palm plantations on degraded and abandoned land that has already been cleared.

Indonesia's government has deployed the military on at least three occasions in recent years to confiscate timber and chase loggers out of its parks -- and has begun training quick response ranger teams to police protected areas. But experts say the new units remain crippled by a lack of funds, vehicles, weapons and equipment, and face a huge threat from ruthless loggers.

"We allow people to open palm oil plantations as long as they replant. Palm oil plantations open a wide range of jobs but they must not do that in conservation areas," Hilman said. The palm oil industry defends itself and its methods.

"If there are some endangered species in the area or an area is of high conservation value, then it will not be opened for plantations," Derom Bangun, executive chairman of the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association, told Reuters.

"The government has classified areas and has rules and we obey them. It is not what people from outside think that we just come, clear land and burn."
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