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From the Concord Monitor Website, by ARTHUR MAX, The Associated Press.
MAJORITY OF COUNTRY'S TIMBER LOGGED ILLEGALLY.
Indonesia's tropical rain forests are disappearing 30 percent faster than previously estimated as illegal loggers raid national parks, threatening the long-term survival of orangutans, according to a U.N. report released yesterday.
Loggers are clearing an estimated 5.2 million acres of forest a year for timber worth $4 billion, said the U.N. Environment Program report, which was released at the triennial meeting of the 171-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
Earlier forecasts said Indonesia's lowland rain forests would be seriously degraded by 2032. But projections based on new satellite surveillance suggest that 98 percent of the forests will be destroyed by 2022, and many protected areas for orangutans will be gone by 2012, the report said.
Only about 7,000 Sumatran orangutans and 50,000 Borneo orangutans remain in the wild. The number of Sumatran orangutans has fallen 91 percent in the last century, based on studies of the number of apes in today's forests, said Ian Redmond, of UNEP's Great Apes Survival Project, which carried out the study.
"The populations are crashing dramatically," the project's Melanie Virtue said.
Orangutans fleeing overlogged areas have ended up in "refugee camps" run by the UNEP project or in Indonesian rescue centers, which now hold about 1,000 orangutans. The report said the illegal trade in young orangutans for private zoos and safari parks has increased to "significant numbers," without specifying further.
A 1975 CITES treaty prohibits all trade in orangutans except by special permit.
Orangutans breed once every seven years, meaning their numbers struggle to recover even without the destruction of their habitat. But the report said they have shown they can survive selective logging. Orangutan numbers dropped in two parts of Sumatra island after large trees were extracted from the forest, but rebounded as the forest regenerated, the report said.
The report estimated up to 88 percent of all Indonesian timber was logged illegally, with illegal loggers operating in 37 of Indonesia's 41 national parks. Further habitat pressure is coming from the clearing of forests to make room for palm oil tree plantations to meet the growing appetite for biofuels, it said.
There was some good news: Indonesian authorities recently intercepted shipments totaling 2.4 million cubic feet - about 3,000 truckloads - of illegal timber and arrested several people, according to the report.
But Virtue said the international community must take a stand. "We are urging consumer nations to do more to ensure the timber they import is legal," she said.
Read the full UNEP Report - "The Last Stand of the Orangutan - State of Emergency: Illegal Logging, Fire and Palm Oil in Indonesia's National Parks" (20Mb PDF)
The Independent, Letters, Published: 13 June 2007
INDONESIA NEEDS OUR HELP NOW TO SAVE ITS FORESTS FROM DISASTER.
Sir: You report that "Illegal logging 'will ruin habitat of wild orang-utans' " (12 June). Last year I led a study of the EC-funded Illegal Logging Response Centre at the Ministry of Forestry in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Centre was about to close after three years, despite having designed and piloted good new ways of tracking cases against illegal loggers through a notoriously corrupt and leaky prosecution system. I was astonished that the EC was closing down this successful initiative, but even more struck by the fact that the Indonesian government had started, for the first time, to take very seriously the rampant logging and deforestation of its national parks, especially those in Sumatra and Borneo that are homes to orang-utans.
The Indonesian authorities have been struggling frantically to protect these parks with extremely limited resources, using imaginative techniques such as microlight aircraft with global positioning systems and radios to guide enforcement teams to logging camps on the ground. These and other methods were being proved to work, but even as solutions were being found and morale was increasing, one by one the western aid agencies that should have been helping were withdrawing their assistance. This was a reaction to earlier events, in 1999-2003, when illegal logging seemed to be genuinely out of control, and before the Indonesian government had decided to act.
The slow-wittedness of donors and their inability to react quickly to new circumstances is now helping to create a catastrophic loss of biodiversity. What Indonesian park managers need right now is money for patrolling and enforcement in the field, money to plug gaps in their resources created when budgets take months to find their way into the forest areas far from Jakarta. What is needed, therefore, is emergency funding for the parks. Not necessarily a lot - €10,000 a year would make a huge difference to enforcement efforts in a typical park - but it needs to be reliable, and it must get there very, very soon. Otherwise, your paper's obituary pages will shortly be filled with the names of extinct wild species, orang-utans among them.
DR JULIAN CALDECOTT
BATH
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