Orangutan Outreach Website - Saving the Orangutan

UNEP Urges Timber Importing Nations and International Community to Back Indonesia’s Efforts by Boosting Customs and Border Controls

The Hague/Nairobi, June 2007-The plight of the ‘old man of the forest’ may be a little brighter today as a result of crack downs by Indonesian authorities on illegal timber smuggling.

But the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is warning that the future of the orangutan, the rainforests of south East Asia and the people whose livelihoods rely on these ecosystems will ultimately depend on international support and regional cooperation especially from timber importing countries.

In recent weeks the Indonesian authorities have stepped up action against the illegal timber trade seizing 30,000 cubic meters of processed wood in Nunukan, East Kalimantan and arresting six people.

A further 40,000 cubic meters of processed wood has been confiscated in Kutai, also East Kalimantan Province along with several arrests.

In a statement released at the triennial conference of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) taking place The Hague, Netherlands, UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said: “We can only applaud the efforts of the Indonesian authorities to stamp out illegal logging and illegal timber trading. It is this illegal trade and the networks of groups who indiscriminately exploit these nature-based assets that are putting forest ecosystems, local peoples’ livelihoods, the orang-utan and a whole host of other species in peril”.

“The seizure of 70,000 cubic metres of illegal wood represents around 3,000 truck loads of timber. But this must be set against the fact that by some estimates illegal logging is clearing 2.1 million hectares of forest in Indonesia annually worth an estimated $4 billion. This may equate to several hundred thousand truckloads corresponding to a continuous line of trucks from Paris to Bangkok,” he added.

“Indonesia cannot and should not have to deal with this issue alone. It requires resources from the international community to support the efforts of the authorities including the wardens on the ground. Indonesia also needs assistance from the timber trading and importing nations including improved policing and customs operations,” added Mr Steiner, who is also a UN Under-Secretary General.

According to GRASP and its network of NGO partners, hundreds of orang-utans have fled out of the jungle and ended up in “refugee” camps as illegal logging rapidly destroys the last remaining rainforests of Southeast Asia.

Further pressure is emerging from the burning and clearance of forests for palm oil plantations to produce biofuels. The greenhouse gas emissions generated from the damage to forests may entirely off-set the gains in emission reductions when the bio diesel is substituted a transport fuel.

Meanwhile, investigations by GRASP together with CITES indicate that hundreds of orang-utans are being rescued and kept in “rescue” or “rehabilitation” camps as the forest is cut or burnt down, straining the resources of many NGOs.

The news comes in the wake of a Rapid Response report from UNEP entitled the Last Stand of the Orang-utan. It has found evidence that logging companies, employing heavy machinery and armed personnel, are also operating in Indonesia’s National Parks in defiance of the law.

And while the Indonesian government has effectively stopped illegal logging in some parks by the use of police and military force the companies, fuelled by the growing demand from importing countries, continue their illegal operations in others.

The rate of loss of the forests, which has accelerated in the past five years, outstrips a previous UNEP report released in 2002 at the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD).

Then experts estimated that most of the suitable orang-utan habitat would be lost by 2032. New satellite imagery reveals that the illegal logging is now entering a new critical phase with the rainforests of south East Asia disappearing 30 per cent faster than had previously been supposed.

Satellite images, together with data from the Indonesian Government, indicates that illegal logging is now taking place in 37 out of 41 national parks and that suitable forest habitat may be gone in a little as a decade.

Melanie Virtue, who leads the GRASP at UNEP, said: “We are observing illegal trade in live orang-utans as a bi-product of the illegal logging. When the forests are burnt or cut down, mothers are often killed while the juveniles are caught to be used as pets, or sold on to zoos or safari parks”

Female orang-utans only give birth every 6-8 years. Often, their mothers are shot and juvenile apes then captured. In some cases, orang-utans are sold for as little as $100 and locally even far cheaper. As the forest is cut down, more orang-utans move into farmlands in search for food and are then either shot or captured.

Willem Wijnstekers, Secretary General of CITES, said: “It is very clear from what is jointly conducted by CITES and GRASP, that there is a highly organized structure of illegal trade in orang-utans. Consequently, there needs to be much higher law enforcement priority allocated to combating this destructive criminality. Such priority needs to come not only from Indonesia, but from the countries importing illegal timber and orang-utans”.

The number of orang-utans sold and exported is unknown but is believed to be in the hundreds of not more. Rescue or rehabilitation centres in Borneo contain around 1,000 orang-utans and one has over 400 individuals alone. Recently significant numbers of illegally obtained young Bornean orang-utans have been found in zoos in Thailand and Cambodia.

Christian Nellemann, a lead author on the Rapid Response report, said: “The rate of decline of the forests is the most alarming we have seen yet anywhere in the World. The real blame lies on the countries buying the timber and wood products from illegal sources. The stepping up of law enforcement in Indonesia is a very encouraging step indeed, but governments in importing countries bear a direct responsibility for the crisis”.

Other measures, able to assist consumers in choosing sustainably harvested wood products include certification and labelling.

Note to Editors:

Bornean and Sumatran orang-utans are classed as Endangered and Critically Endangered and are listed on Appendix 1 of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Recent estimates suggest there are between 45,000 and 69,000 Bornean and no more than 7,300 Sumatran orang-utans left in the wild.

The orang-utans share their habitat with a wild range of other threatened and ecologically important species including the Sumatran tiger, Sumatran rhinoceros and Asian elephant. UNEP and the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) have launched the Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP) in response to growing concern over the plight of the orang-utan, chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla.

The report Last stand of the Orang-utan: State of Emergency can be downloaded at www.grida.no or at www.unep.org/grasp/docs/2007Jan-LastStand-of-Orangutan-report.pdf or www.globio.info including high and low resolution graphics for free use in publications.

For more information, please contact Nick Nuttall, UNEP spokesperson, on Tel +254 20 7623084, Mobile +254 733 632755 E-mail: nick.nuttall@unep.org

Source: UNEP News Release

The Associated Press
Monday, June 11, 2007

THE HAGUE, Netherlands: Indonesia’s tropical rain forests are disappearing 30 percent faster than previously estimated as illegal loggers raid large national parks, threatening the long-term survival of orangutans, according to a U.N. report released Monday.

Indonesian authorities recently intercepted shipments totaling 70,000 cubic meters — about 3,000 truck loads — of illegal timber and arrested several people, but loggers were clearing an estimated 2.1 million hectares (5.2 million acres) of forest a year for timber worth US$4 billion (€3 billion), said the report by the U.N. Environment Program, UNEP.

Only about 7,000 Sumatran orangutans and about 50,000 Borneo orangutans now exist in the wild. “The populations are crashing dramatically,” said Melanie Virtue of UNEP’s Great Apes Survival Project, which carried out the study.

The number of Sumatran orangutans has fallen 91 percent in the last century, the report said, based on studies of the number of apes in today’s dense forests, said Ian Redmond.

Orangutans fleeing overlogged areas have ended up in “refugee camps” run by the great apes project. Indonesian rescue centers now have about 1,000 orangutans, and the illegal trade in young orangutans for private zoos and safari parks has increased to “significant numbers,” the report said, without specifying further.

Earlier forecasts said Indonesia’s natural rain forest would be seriously degraded by 2032. But projections based on new satellite surveillance suggested that 98 percent of lowland forest will be destroyed by 2022, and many protected areas will be gone within the next five years, said the report, called “The Last Stand of the Orangutan.”

Orangutans breed only once in seven years, meaning their numbers struggle to recover even without the destruction of their habitat.

But it said orangutans have shown they can survive selective logging. Evidence from Ketgambe and Gunung Leuser in Sumatra showed their numbers declined after large trees were extracted from the forest, but rebounded as the forest regenerated.

The report was released at the triennial meeting of the 171-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, CITES.

The 1975 CITES treaty prohibits all trade in orangutans except by special permit.

The report said illegal loggers were operating in 37 out of 41 Indonesian national parks. Further habitat pressure is coming from plantation owners clearing forests for palm oil trees to meet the growing appetite for biofuels.

“We are urging consumer nations to do more to ensure the timber they import is legal,” said Virtue. The report estimates that up to 88 percent of all Indonesian timber was logged illegally, usually shipped abroad after being processed into lumber in saw mills or used as pulp.

Source: http://www.iht.com/

June 11, 2007 — By Alister Doyle, Reuters

THE HAGUE — Illegal logging could destroy the last forest strongholds of orangutans within a decade and the world should do more to help Indonesia halt smuggling both of apes and of timber, a U.N. report said on Monday.

Burning of forests, sometimes to clear land to grow palm oil for biofuels, was adding to threats to endangered orangutans which live on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, according to a report issued at a U.N. wildlife conference.

“Indonesia cannot and should not have to deal with this issue alone,” Achim Steiner, the head of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), said in a statement. He urged more funding for wardens and a global customs crackdown on illegal trade.

“It is very clear … that there is a highly organised structure of illegal trade in orangutans,” said Willem Wijnstekers, Secretary General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

China was the main destination for illegally logged timber from orangutan regions, mainly in Indonesia, but much of it also ended up in Japan, the European Union and the United States, according to UNEP.

Hundreds of orangutans were believed to have been exported, often caught as they fled loggers. Young orangutans had been spotted in zoos in Thailand and Cambodia.

“Satellite images, together with data from the Indonesian government, indicates that illegal logging is now taking place in 37 out of 41 national parks and that suitable forest habitat (for orangutans) may be gone in as little as a decade,” it said.

A United Nations report in 2002, which raised alarm about the plight of the apes, had projected that most of the habitat suitable for orangutans would be lost by 2032. In February, UNEP had put the date at 2022.

“We are bringing the date forward again,” said Christian Nellemann, a lead author of the report. “The rate of decline of the forests is the fastest we have seen anywhere in the world.”

UNEP praised Indonesia for cracking down on loggers by seizing 70,000 cubic metres of processed wood, enough to fill 3,000 trucks, in East Kalimantan province and arresting several people in the past few weeks.

But UNEP’s Steiner said: “This must be set against the fact that by some estimates illegal logging is clearing 2.1 million hectares of forest in Indonesia annually worth an estimated $4 billion.

“This may equate to several hundred thousand truckloads — corresponding to a continuous line of trucks from Paris to Bangkok,” he added.

UNEP estimated there might be between 45,000 and 69,000 orangutans in Borneo and 7,300 in Sumatra.

Source: http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=12931&ref=rss

By Nora Schultz
07 June 2007

Chimp populations, like humans, have local customs, and these cultural practices can spread to other troops, researchers say.

The spread of such traditions and innovations to different groups is an important hallmark of culture, and a necessary part of development through social learning, they say.

Andrew Whiten at the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues taught individual chimpanzees one of two ways to solve complex foraging tasks, and observed how the different techniques spread across two sets of three groups. The chimps had to manipulate a combination of buttons, levers or discs to extract treats from cubes. Watch a video of chimps completing the tasks.

Although no chimps cracked the puzzles without instruction during an initial encounter with the cubes, animals in the two groups learned quickly how to work the devices when watching a peer who had been trained in one of the two possible sets of solutions.

Within a few days, most chimps mastered the techniques that had been “seeded” this way in their group.

Distance learning

The cubes were then moved into the view of a second set of chimp groups, so they could observe their respective neighbours solving the tasks. The new groups learned the same techniques as demonstrated in the adjacent enclosure, and then passed their set of tricks on to a third group in another round of experiments.

“This is the first time we can show such transmission of socially learned behaviour patterns between groups of animals”, says Antoine Spiteri, who was involved in the study.

The team had previously found social learning of similarly complex tasks within groups, but to spread widely, cultural traditions must catch on with new groups, too, the researchers say.

Carel van Schaik at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, who studies orang-utan culture, says that the new results show “beyond a doubt that apes are capable of transmitting pretty complex traditions. The question is now to what extent this reflects what’s going on in the wild.”

Group dynamics

Van Schaik’s group hopes to find out more about this by measuring “peering” behaviour in wild orang-utans - highly-focused watching of another animal from a short distance which may be a potential mechanism for social learning. “The whole picture is coming together”, he says.

Next Spiteri wants to unravel exactly how chimp culture spreads: “We need to see how status and prestige of different animals affect who learns from whom.”

An analysis of Whiten’s group’s studies already shows that the order in which individuals in each group picked up new traditions was similar for foraging tasks, but not for unrelated tasks, giving first insights into the dynamics of cultural transmission.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/

JAKARTA, June 8 (Reuters) - Indonesian palm oil producers are asking the government to define clearly forest areas that need conserving to help prevent plantations from encroaching on critical habitats, a senior industry official on Friday.

Environmental groups are concerned that rapidly expanding palm oil plantations, partly on ambitious plans for biofuel, are damaging pristine rain forests and driving out rare species.

Derom Bangun, executive chairman of the Indonesia Palm Oil Producers Association, said the government should map out forest areas for conservation and for agricultural activity.

“By having them clear and publicised, everybody can be sure that we are cultivating in areas which are already considered suitable for them without sacrificing or at the expense of habitat for rare species,” Bangun told Reuters.

The association had asked its members to map out areas that might have significant biodiversity, contain threatened species or have special cultural significance, he said.

“Now in new areas they make a thorough survey first. When they find high conservation forest, they would not open it,” Bangun said, adding that members should also follow the principles set out by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

The body, which includes palm oil producers, processors, users and environmentalists, aims to promote the production and the use of sustainable palm oil.

“We hope and we are sure by using the criteria and principle, opening new plantation will be done carefully,” he said.

But controlling hundreds of firms opening up new plantations may be hard. The association’s membership covers only 30 percent of the country’s total palm oil plantation area of 6 million hectares.

Bangun said the task had been complicated by devolved powers making regional governments in charge of licensing new plantations.

“There is a controversy in the field. The regional government decides certain areas which they think can be converted as agriculture areas but central government said the area should be preserve as forestry areas,” Bangun said.

“But in general, companies merely follow guidelines given by the government.”

Malaysia and Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil producers, struck a deal last month to take measures to counter environmental concerns they said were undermining palm oil’s claim to be a green fuel.

This includes setting up a technical group to mount a pro-industry campaign in Europe, the second-largest consumer of palm oil and the biggest source of demand for palm-based biofuel.

Greenpeace says Indonesia had the fastest pace of deforestation in the world in 2000-2005, with an area of forest equivalent to 300 soccer pitches destroyed each hour.

Friends of the Earth says almost 90 percent of orangutans’ habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia has now disappeared and, if the destruction continues, Asia’s only great ape could become extinct in 12 years.

(Additional reporting by Mita Valina Liem)

Source: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/JAK53780.htm

Originally posted 9 May, 2007 — video link added 7 June, 2007
By Clemmie Gleeson

A COALITION of some of UK’s most powerful environmental groups has launched an advertising campaign attacking the Government’s biofuels policy.

See the campaign video on YouTube

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Go directly to Friends of the Earth’s Campaign site

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The adverts, which have been placed in national newspapers feature a petrol pump being held to the head of an orang-utan. The slogan says: “Tell the Government to choose the right biofuel. Or the orang-utan gets it.”The groups including Friends of the Earth, RSPB, Greenpeace and WWF-UK believe that the UK Government’s Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (ReTFO) could, in its present form, lead to biofuel production causing the destruction of rainforests and wetlands.They are demanding that the ReTFO is tightened up to ensure that biofuel producers meet minimum greenhouse gas and sustainability standards. They also want to see environmental audits introduced for the whole life-cycle of the fuels, from growing the crops to burning the fuel in the car.The adverts ask members of the public to write to Government and demand tough, compulsory standards.

It comes after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report last week stating that protecting the world’s forests is one of the single biggest steps the international community can take to lessen the effects of climate change.

John Alker, senior public affairs officer at WWF-UK said that biofuels could offer part of the solution to climate change: “But Government needs to get this policy right in order to do so.”

Dr Douglas Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace described the ReTFO as ‘complacent’. “It could see biofuel production wrecking the climate rather than helping it. The Government must sort out this botched plan or risk losing the value that biofuels could offer.”

Ed Matthew from Friends of the Earth said that the Government has got its priorities wrong. “Its biofuels proposals are so weak that they are in real danger of increasing global warming emissions, not reducing them.”

Meanwhile, Dr Mark Avery, conservation director at the RSPB, said that without environmental standards, biofuels are ‘a green con’.

Read the original post here:
http://www.farmersguardian.com/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=9542

Go directly to Friends of the Earth’s Campaign site

Thursday, 31 May 2007

The ancestors of humans began walking upright while they were still living in trees - not out on open land, according to a new theory.

The traditional view is of bipedalism evolving gradually from the four-legged “knuckle-walking” displayed by chimpanzees and gorillas today.

Now, a study published in the journal Science disputes this idea.

The British authors of the study say that upright walking was always a feature of great ape behaviour.

Humans inherited it without ever passing through a knuckle-walking phase.

They believe that knuckle-walking evolved only recently as a way of getting around the forest floor.

Susannah Thorpe, Robin Crompton and Roger Holder came to their conclusions after analysing the movement of wild orangutans, which spend most of their lives in trees.

They found that orangutans used upright locomotion to fetch food from the small branches of trees and to cross directly from one tree to another.

“Both access to fruits and crossing gaps in the trees would require an ability to navigate very thin, terminal tree branches which are liable to bend under body mass,” said Professor Robin Crompton, from the University of Liverpool.

“The logical conclusion from the environmental, fossil, and experimental evidence is that upright, straight-legged walking originally evolved as an adaptation to tree-dwelling.”

Selective advantages

They suggest the shift made by our ancestors to a terrestrial lifestyle came about as climate change thinned out their forest habitat.

In response, these ancient ape-like creatures, or hominids, may have abandoned the high canopy for the forest floor. Here, they remained bipedal and began eating food from the ground or from smaller trees.

Professor Crompton explained that orangutans walking upright on springy branches act much like athletes running on springy tracks - they use extended postures of knee and hip to give them straighter legs.

The researchers point out that some of the earliest fossil human ancestors combined lower limbs that were adapted for upright walking with an upper body that seems suited to climbing trees.

There is also evidence these bipedal creatures lived in a closed forest environment, not the savannah habitat that would have required them to routinely move on the ground.

Daniel Lieberman, a biological anthropologist from Harvard University, US, told BBC News: “I think it’s a neat paper; it’s always terrific when people think creatively about the origins of human bipedalism. But it’s not going to be the last word.

“The big problem is - what was the selective advantage for that first hominid that stood upright? We know very little about the context in which that occurred.”

Dr Lieberman also questioned the idea that the kind of locomotion displayed by chimps and gorillas must have evolved only recently.

Chimps, gorillas and humans are more closely related to one another than they are to orangutans.

“The relationships between the apes are not in question,” he said, “unless all those similarities between chimps and gorillas are independently evolved, then the inference is inescapable that the last common ancestor of chimps and humans must have been like a chimp or gorilla.”

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/6709627.stm

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Elephants and the ivory trade come under the spotlight as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) summit opens.

Just prior to the opening, a committee voted that a limited sale of stockpiled ivory from southern Africa to Japan could go ahead.

Some African countries want a 20-year ban on trading ivory.

The two-week meeting in The Hague will also seek protection for the sawfish, cedar, and some corals.

Conservation groups are targeting China’s tiger farming business.

The three-yearly Cites meetings set restrictions on trade in species regarded as endangered or threatened.

This year’s summit on the 32-year old treaty brings 175 national delegations to The Hague, along with other UN agencies, and conservation and animal welfare organisations.

Opposing visions

Two starkly different approaches to the largely banned ivory trade will be up for discussion.

CITES EXPLAINED
Threatened organisms listed on three appendices depending on level of risk
Appendix 1 - all international trade banned
Appendix 2 - international trade monitored and regulated
Appendix 3 - trade bans by individual governments, others asked to assist
“Uplisting” - moving organism to a more protective appendix, “downlisting” - the reverse
Conferences of the Parties (COPs) held every three years
Cites administered by UN Environment Programme (Unep)

Kenya and Mali are seeking a total 20-year moratorium, while Botswana and Namibia are seeking increased exports.

Cites has twice before granted southern African countries the right to export ivory from stockpiles to Asia.

Concerns over mechanisms for monitoring the trade had prevented the second sale, approved in 2002, from taking place.

But on the eve of the meeting, a technical committee decided that mechanisms to monitor poaching in Africa were sufficiently effective, and that Japan had established proper safeguards to ensure only the designated ivory was imported. South Africa, Botswana and Namibia will sell 60 tonnes to the Asian nation.

Conservationists believe any extension in legal exports will fuel the already substantial illegal trade.

“Every time Cites even talks about relaxing the ivory ban, poaching goes up,” said Peter Pueschel of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw).

A recent report from the wildlife trade monitoring organisation Traffic said there were now 92 seizures of illegal ivory seizures each month.

All at sea

Fresh from a string of defeats at the International Whaling Commission in Alaska, Japan is trying another route to an expansion of whaling by asking Cites to review restrictions on trading whale meat.

Conservation and animal welfare organisations are also alarmed by China’s bid for a relaxation of rules on trading products from tiger farms which have sprung up in recent decades.

“If you open up a legal trade in tiger parts, it opens up a huge demand which can obviously cause problems for the wild populations,” observed Dave Eastham, head of wildlife at the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA).

The list of life-forms for which governments are seeking extra protection is dominated by marine organisms.

The sawfish, hunted for its spectacular rostrum (snout), the porbeagle shark, and the spiny dogfish (whose meat is sold in British fish and chip shops under the name rock salmon) are all being depleted fast.

Red and pink corals, extracted principally in Asia and the Mediterranean and exported mainly to the US for use in necklaces, are also on the target list of conservation-minded governments.

However, there is opposition to listing some of these species, notably from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which feels effective fisheries management would be a better and less bureaucratic option.

On land, protection is being sought for some rosewood and cedar trees. Pau Brazil, whose wood is used in top-of-the-range violin bows, may also gain protection.

One long-term issue likely to divide delegates is a proposal that development and poverty concerns should be taken into account when deciding Cites restrictions.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6715923.stm

By Leony Aurora and Arijit Ghosh

June 5 (Bloomberg) — Indonesia, the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, won’t allow oil palm growers to cut primary forests for establishing plantations, Minister for Environment Rachmat Witoelar said.

Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the Southeast Asian nation, the biggest producer of the gas after the U.S. and China, is growing at a rate of 4 percent a year, compared with 3.5 percent in India and 2.7 percent in China, according to a report released yesterday by the World Bank.

Indonesia is trying to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, 75 percent of which results from deforestation. The country is set to overtake Malaysia this year as the world’s largest palm oil supplier and plans to add 1.5 million hectares of the crop over the next three years, the government said.

“Expansion of palm oil plantations will not be allowed to sacrifice natural forests,” Witoelar said in an interview in Bali yesterday. “They will be planted in lots that are already empty. There are plenty of these, 18 million hectares of them.”

Palm oil can be converted into methyl esters, which may be added to conventional fuels to reduce carbon emissions. Such substitutions have come into favor after crude oil more than tripled since November 2001.

Biofuel Projects

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is betting on biofuels made from cassava, jathropa and palm oil to create 5 million jobs and help him keep his election promise to cut unemployment. The government plans to add 7 million hectares of plantations by 2011, according to its biofuels plan.

China National Offshore Oil Corp., the nation’s third- largest oil company, will partner PT Sinar Mas Agro Resources & Technology in investing $5.5 billion in an eight-year program for biofuel projects in Indonesia, the companies said on Jan. 9. The two companies and Hong Kong Energy Ltd. will invest in the planting of crops to make biofuels in Papua and Borneo.

“The areas we are talking about are those designated for plantation,” said Gandi Sulistiyanto Soeherman, managing director of the Sinar Mas Group, which is also waiting for the government to give tax breaks for the project. “What Witoelar means must be that you can’t clear land by burning it or by any way that affects the environment.”

Activists said the environment ministry’s rule isn’t followed by many district and regional governments. Indonesia devolved power to districts in 2001.

Power Struggle

“We have seen some districts give permits to open up areas for oil plantations,” said Fitrian Ardiansyah, program coordinator for forest restoration at the World Wide Fund for Nature in Jakarta. “It’s a power struggle between the layers of authority.”

The government hasn’t made it clear which areas will be available for plantations, Ardiansyah said.

Companies want to plant more oil palm trees as prices of the vegetable oil, used also as cooking oil and to make soap, have almost doubled in the past year on surging demand from China and India, the world’s biggest buyers of the commodity.

Palm oil for August delivery, the most actively traded contract on the Malaysia Derivatives Exchange, rose 60 ringgit, or 2.3 percent, to a record 2,661 ringgit ($781.60) a ton at 4:24 p.m. in Kuala Lumpur.

Oil palm production in Indonesia has been a major reason for deforestation, the World Bank said in a report titled “Indonesia and Climate Change” released yesterday.

The move to expand biofuel production is “still risky and problematic” it said.

Indonesia, which has the world’s third-largest expanse of tropical forest, adds 2,000 million tons of carbon dioxide a year from forest fires and decomposition of peatlands.

Indonesia’s peatlands stretch across an area the size of the U.K., Jack Rieley, a geographic professor at the University of Nottingham in England, said on Oct. 30. Peat, from which coal is formed, can burn for months and release gases that produce sulfuric acid.

To contact the reporter on this story: Leony Aurora in Nusa Dua, Bali, at laurora@bloomberg.net ; Arijit Ghosh in Jakarta at aghosh@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: June 5, 2007 04:36 EDT

June 05, 2007

JAKARTA (Antara): European Union (EU) and United States representatives at a G-8 meeting on illegal logging in Berlin, Germany, have reported that a number of Malaysian businessmen were involved in illegal logging in Kalimantan and Papua, an Indonesian delegate to the conference said.

The EU and US representatives mentioned their discovery at the G-8 meeting on June 5 in the presence of Yusuf Faishal, chairman of the Indonesian House of Representatives Commission IV who was representing Indonesia, according to a press statementissued by the House Commission on Tuesday.

Yusuf said Ana Maria Gomes, a member of the European Parliament who was also former Portuguese Ambassador to Indonesia in 1999-2003 told the meeting she found some Malaysian businessmen engaged in illegal logging in Kalimantan when she was making a working visit to Kalimantan in 2003.

The atmosphere at the meeting became rather tense as the Malaysian deputy plantation minister who represented his country categorically denied Gomes’s statement, Yusuf said.

A representative of the US environmental watchdog attending the meeting also said Malaysian businessmen had taken part in illegal logging activity in Indonesia. The logs were exported to China, he said.

Yusuf said the House’s Commission IV was planning to invite the Malaysian Ambassador in Jakarta to a discussion on the issue.(***)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/