15 October 2007

BRUSSELS, Belgium: A U.N. expert on the right to food called Monday for a five-year moratorium on the production of biofuel out of concern that it was contributing to hunger by using up increasing amounts of farmland.

On the eve of World Food Day, Jean Ziegler countered U.S. President George W. Bush’s call for an increase in biofuel, arguing farm production should be used to contain hunger instead.

“You don’t have the right, even if you’re battling climate change, to (perpetuate) this total massacre” caused by lack of food, he said.

Using biofuels instead of gasoline in cars is generally considered to cut CO2 emissions, although some scientists say greenhouse gases released during the production of biofuel crops can offset those gains.

The use of crops for biofuel has become especially predominant in Brazil and the United States. In March 2007, President Bush and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil signed an agreement committing their countries to increased ethanol production.

Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/15/europe/EU-GEN-EU-UN-Biofuel.php#

Orangutans are on the brink of extinction, yet Malaysian officials are trading two of them to Brazil for a couple of snakes. Unbelievable….

October 14, 2007 10:28 AM

Anaconda For Python Park At Ulu Bendul

KUALA PILAH, Oct 14 (Bernama) — The anaconda, the world’s largest snake, will be the star attraction at the Python Park being developed at the Ulu Bendul recreation forest.

“When completed, the python park will become the first of its kind in Asia,” Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan said.

He said the Forestry Department had been charged with implementing the project which will become another attraction at the recreation forest on the foot of Gunung Angsi.

“We have been promised two anacondas from Brazil in exchange for two orang utans from Sabah. The anacondas are expected to arrive soon,” he said.

The anaconda is an icon of the Amazon jungle and can weigh in at 200kg each. It is usually found in the wild as the anaconda makes the rivers and swamps its natural habitat.

– BERNAMA

Source: http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/state_news/news.php?id=289958&cat=ct

12 October 2007

Lennart Daléus, the general secretary of the Nordic section of Greenpeace, said at a seminar in Helsinki on Friday that Finland’s Neste Oil should seriously consider pulling the plug on its biodiesel fuel production.

According to Greenpeace, Neste uses palm oil, grown in Indonesia and Malaysia in a way that destroys rain forests, speeds up climate change and drives many species to the edge of extinction.

Greenpeace Finland said the use of biofuels made sense only when they were produced in a sustainable manner and used to power fuel-efficient vehicles and that the Finnish government had singularly failed to encourage people to buy more efficient cars.

Source: http://newsroom.finland.fi/stt/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=16957&group=General

October 13, 2007
The race for clean energy may be doing more harm than good, writes Marian Wilkinson.

It is a sickening picture. A photograph of six soft-eyed baby orang-utans stamped with the words “Orphaned by Palm Oil companies”. The image, along with scores of others showing adult apes staring out through the bars of cages, has created a public relations disaster for global companies buying the oil that many hoped would fuel a green energy boom.

This week, as Greenpeace International launched a “Forest Defenders Camp” in the Indonesian province of Riau, where swathes of orang-utan habitat have been cleared by felling and fire for lucrative palm oil plantations, the “oil for ape” scandal hit Australia.

Caught in the middle is a quietly spoken Sydney businessman who walked away from the petroleum industry several years ago convinced that price, supply and climate change made it yesterday’s game. Barry Murphy, a former Caltex Oil chief, plunged into the heady world of “clean” energy hoping to fuel Australian industry with diesel made from the world’s second most popular edible oil.

“It would be foolish to ignore the fact that people are anxious about fossil fuel and its effect on the environment and that it’s not sustainable,” Murphy told the Herald last week. “People are naturally looking to palm oil.” Why? “It has the highest yield of any of the vegetable oils. You can get 4000 to 5000 litres of oil per hectare per year.” That is about 10 times more productive than soya beans.

Perhaps unfortunately, Murphy is not alone in his thinking. In January this year, the China National Offshore Oil company reportedly signed contracts to develop 1 million hectares of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

This thinking has sent palm oil stocks soaring. European countries hoping to slash their greenhouse gas emissions by using biofuels have also turned their attention to palm oil. Already a ubiquitous ingredient in supermarket products from margarine to lipstick, palm oil’s promise as a clean biofuel supercharged the price which reached a staggering $US828 ($921) a metric tonne last month, a leap of more than $US300 in just one year.

But the palm oil boom is proving to be an ecological disaster in Indonesia and Malaysia, which produce more than 80 per cent of the world supply. The trade has helped drive Indonesia’s spectacular rate of deforestation and the burning of its peatlands. Early this year, the United Nations released a report on the crisis, finding that the explosion in palm oil plantations “is now the primary cause of permanent rainforest loss” in Indonesia and Malaysia. As the forest disappears, local environmentalists estimate that up to 50 orang-utans are dying each week.

More importantly, the rate of destruction makes Indonesia the third largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world after the US and China. With new satellite imagery showing that South-East Asia’s rainforest is disappearing at a rate 30 per cent faster than predicted, the implications of the palm oil boom are now galvanising world attention from Geneva to Canberra.

When the NSW Greens targeted Barry Murphy’s Natural Fuels Australia Limited this week, the federal Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was quick to say that the local companies using palm oil had undertaken to get stocks from suppliers that abide by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. Turnbull went a step further, pledging that Australia would push for international action at the UN Bali climate talks in December to establish a sustainable palm oil industry, “as part of its efforts to curb global deforestation”.

Turnbull’s new-found interest in the palm oil industry attracted criticism from environmentalists as too little too late. While Australia promised $200 million earlier this year to fight deforestation in South-East Asia, Canberra has yet to fully come to grips with the destructive scale of the palm oil business just to our north. As yet there are no accredited sustainable palm oil suppliers.

As chairman of Natural Fuels Australia, Murphy has spent the past two years working global corporations like Unilever and Cadbury Schweppes on the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil over the vexed question of sustainability. His company is part-owned by Natural Fuels Ltd, chaired by the former Liberal Party leader John Hewson, which has a big Singapore plant under way, and Babcock and Brown Environmental Investments. Murphy’s company began work on its Darwin biodiesel plant this year - based on palm oil from South-East Asia - and it is expected to be operational by December.

But how do you produce palm oil in a way that does not damage the environment, threaten endangered species and exploit local landowners when the sheer scale of plantation expansion is breathtaking? The environmental activist group Palm Oil Action says Indonesian figures show plantations there have expanded from 600,000 hectares in 1985 to 6.4 million last year.

This year’s UN report, The Last Stand of the Orang-utan, found that the drive for palm oil biofuel, rather than helping to curb greenhouse gas emissions, was making them worse. “Ironically, in the desire to cut CO2 emissions, Western markets are driving ecosystem destruction and producing vast and significant CO2 emissions through forest burnt and peat swamp drainage,” the report said.

Murphy is acutely sensitive to the debate. “We recognised early on there were concerns about palm oil,” he told the Herald. “They have gone up the scale rather rapidly. They are real issues, they are world issues and they have to be addressed.”

Murphy is frustrated by organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that are demanding a moratorium on any new plantations. This week, the NSW Greens MP Ian Cohen publicly called on the State Government to block plans by Natural Fuels to build a $30 million biodiesel plant at Port Botany because it will be fed by palm oil.

Murphy is heading to Kuala Lumpur next month for a critical meeting of the Roundtable hoping to get a credible scheme for the certification of sustainable palm oil. He is all too aware of the criticism that a self-regulated industry group is unlikely to produce a system that satisfies many environmental activists.

He points out, however, that the industry is not going to disappear and controls are critical - a view echoed by WWF.

“Just pointing fingers and saying palm oil is bad or palm oil for biodiesel should not be allowed is not the issue,” Murphy contends. “There’s no free lunch.”

The global debate over palm oil has focused attention on just how climate-friendly so-called “biofuels” really are. This debate comes just as the NSW Government introduced its scheme mandating that ethanol-blended petrol must form 2 per cent of the total petrol sold in the state. The oil giant BP has taken on the challenge with fanfare, saying its E10 blend of “renewable ethanol” (10 per cent ethanol with 90 per cent petrol) is made from local wheat and sugar byproducts - and contains no palm oil.

BP globally is big on biofuels but, like all energy companies wrestling with greenhouse gas emissions, the company is aware of the fraught debate over “sustainable” biofuels. In the US, the Government-backed push for corn-based ethanol is creating friction between corn growers and cattle and pig producers who are angry at the rising price of their feedstock.

In Mexico, record corn prices early this year, driven by biofuel production, fanned strikes and protests when the cost of corn tortillas, a basic food, shot up 30 per cent. And with climate change also expected to lead to longer droughts and more severe floods, threatening food production globally, serious questions are being raised over the use of agricultural land for fuel crops.

In Australia, the fledgling industry is also battling to overcome early difficulties outside sustainability questions. Companies are using products such as tallow (animal fat) that will not be hit by the price shocks seen in corn and wheat. Even algae are under investigation as potentially producing 40 times as much fuel per hectare as corn.

The independent operator Australian Biodiesel Group, which uses tallow, is calling on the Federal Government to mandate a 2 per cent target for biofuel nationally, especially for biodiesel. Its chief executive, Martin Earp, fears the small biodiesel industry not linked with the big oil companies “is on the verge of collapse”. He said Federal Government disincentives, combined with the distribution power of the main oil companies, are pushing out the smaller companies.

With climate change a key issue in the upcoming election, both the main political parties will be putting forward policies supporting biofuels as a way of combating climate change. But with a more critical spotlight on the industry, both companies and environmental groups will be demanding a more complex and credible approach than the one on offer so far.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/10/12/1191696173955.html

When the Swedish Crown Princess Victoria turned 30 years old this summer the organisation Borneo Orangutan Survival Sweden (BOS) gave her a symbolic adoption of the orangutan Kesi together with a book and DVD about the orangutans. Today BOS board members, Mattias Klum and Jonas Wahlström, will meet the Crown Princess at the royal castle to personally deliver the present.

BOS is working to save the orangutans and their habitat, the rainforest, in Borneo. One way to highlight this is to give this symbolic adoption of little Kesi to the Crown Princess. The Crown Princess has a great interest for both animal and the environment and we are very proud to be presenting her with this gift, says Pernilla Svenberg, Secretary General of BOS Sweden.

The orangutan Kesi was found when she was only a few months old, alone and abandoned. Her mother had been killed by poachers and Kesi’s left hand was missing, probably as a result of trying to escape from the poachers.

A great variety of species is disappearing forever as a result of the extreme ravaging of the tropical rainforest. The orangutan is only the tip of the iceberg but many species have already been lost and thousands of others will be lost unless this negative trend is stopped. By making the Crown Princess an adoptive parent to Kesi it will help to highlight the issues facing the orangutan, the rainforest and all its species says, Mattias Klum, board member of BOS Sweden.

The adoption is an excellent alternative present that is suitable for birthdays, christenings wedding or other days of importance. By becoming an adoptive parent people will help both the orangutans and the rainforest.

— The orangutans are not only threatened by loss of habitat but also by climate change. The climate change is affecting the biodiversity and thereby the food of the orangutans. We have to act now to save the last orangutans and the rainforest, says Jonas Wahlström, board member of BOS Sweden.

For more info and photo material please contact

Pernilla Svenberg
BOS Sweden Director
Email: info@orangutanger.se
Phone: 0046 732-31 37 94
www.orangutanger.se

Download the press release [pdf]

Photo copyright: BOS Sweden/Christian Åslund

Marian Wilkinson - Environment Editor
October 11, 2007

The rush to replace carbon-emitting petroleum with “clean green” biofuels is threatening to stall in the face of rising food prices, Federal Government disincentives and growing opposition from environmental groups sounding the alarm about large-scale deforestation to support fuel crops.

Now a planned $30 million biodiesel plant in Port Botany is under attack by the Greens because it will use palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia. Its future is up in the air as the developer, Natural Fuels Australia, decides whether it should go ahead. The chairman of the company, Barry Murphy, said yesterday that the Federal Government clean fuels grant did not in reality encourage the use of pure biodiesel from crops and therefore “makes the economics difficult”. He also acknowledged the price of feedstock and the global issues around climate change and deforestation made the decision a tough one.

The Greens state MP Ian Cohen is demanding that NSW reject the planning request by Natural Fuels for the biodiesel plant, saying the minister, Frank Sartor, has failed to consider its effect on rainforest destruction because of the plant’s proposed use of palm oil. Mr Cohen has written to Mr Sartor saying the plant, rather than helping climate change, “may worsen the global crisis whilst hastening the destruction of tropical forests”.

A spokesman for the Planning Department said the importation of palm oil was a Federal Government matter.

This week Natural Fuels found itself at the centre of a political storm over its planned importation of palm oil for use in its plant in Darwin, which will come on line in December.

The Federal Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, announced Australia would push for international action on the sustainable sourcing of palm oil at the United Nations climate talks in Bali in December.

The Federal Government provides a 38 cents a litre subsidy for biofuels, including those made from palm oil, as part of its push to encourage clean green fuel. But at the same time Mr Turnbull has pledged $200 million to stop deforestation in South-East Asia, caused partly by a huge expansion in palm oil plantations.

Earlier this year the UN reported that the drive for new palm oil plantations was one of the greatest threats to the rainforests and the endangered orang-utans in the region. “In Indonesia and Malaysia it is now the primary cause of permanent rainforest loss,” the report found. Plantations in Indonesia have expanded from 600,000 hectares in 1985 to an estimated 6.4 million hectares this year, the Palm Oil Action Group says.

The devastation of rainforest and peatlands has caused some big European biofuel companies to shun palm oil as a source. But companies like Natural Fuels are anxious to create a “sustainable” source of palm oil and have joined forces with large companies such as Cadbury Schweppes and Unilever, and the environment group WWF, to form the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

At a meeting next month in Kuala Lumpur, the group will call on growers, wholesalers and retailers to accept a code of practice curbing destructive activities, including the clearing and burning of rainforest. Mr Murphy has been heavily involved in the reforms and said the company realised “these are real issues and need to be addressed”.

But several environmental groups, including Greenpeace, say the roundtable group is dependent on self-regulation and will be incapable of enforcing sustainable production.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/10/10/1191695991726.html

Source: Reuters - October 1, 2007
By Veronica Brown, LONDON

Protecting the environment is at the heart of Indonesia’s future plans for palm oil production and companies caught destroying protected forests are being prosecuted, the country’s agriculture minister said on Monday. Anton Apriyantono said accusations of bad farming practice leveled by non-government organizations were not giving concerned European consumers the correct picture of palm oil production in Indonesia, set to overtake Malaysia this year as the world’s top producer.

“Yes there is some uncommon practice destroying some forest land, we admit that, but this is not common practice,” Apriyantono told Reuters in an interview in London. “We will do our job to solve the problem. On forest fires, we have been prosecuting several companies. Some are already in jail,” he added.

Palm oil, used as a food and in products ranging from cosmetics to biofuel, has come under fire from environmentalists in Europe and America who say the rapid expansion in palm cultivation is responsible for vanishing tropical forests and wildlife.

Scientists have warned biofuels are likely to speed up global warming as they have encouraged farmers to burn tropical forests that have absorbed a large portion of greenhouse gases. Greenpeace says Indonesia had the fastest pace of deforestation in the world between 2000-2005, with an area of forest equivalent to 300 soccer pitches destroyed every hour.

EXAPNSION IN THE BALANCE?

Indonesia has a palm oil planted area of around 6 million hectares, which is expected to expand by around 300,000 hectares per annum, Apriyantono said, adding that primary forest areas were not being disturbed for planting purposes. But he said a campaign spearheaded by green groups, encouraging a boycott of palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia had the potential to cause major damage to the their most important foreign currency earner.

“So far I don’t think there’s an effect in terms of value of the economy. But the political pressure is really high,” Apriyantono said. “A ban on palm oil in Europe would be big trouble for us because the palm oil industry is our heart in our country,” he added.

A top Malaysian palm oil industry official said earlier on Monday that the campaign by environment groups against palm oil is costing the product market share in Europe. Malaysia’s Synergy Drive, the world’s largest plantation company, has already launched a campaign to prevent a consumer backlash against its business.

Monday, October 08, 2007
Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A study predicts that global warming will further decimate the orangutan population in Sebangau National Park in Central Kalimantan, home to Indonesia’s largest orangutan habitat.

About 6,900 orangutans out of the estimated 14,000 on Kalimantan Island currently occupy the 567,700-hectare park.

“The rising temperature and rainfall will have adverse consequences on plant species in the park,” Chairul Saleh, the biodiversity conservation coordinator at WWF Indonesia, told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

“The plants are sensitive to climate changes. This will threaten food supplies for the orangutans.”

Orangutans are reliant on the trees and fruit for their existence.

Chairul said that coupled with the long-standing problem of forest fires, global warming would affect the reproductive cycle of the orangutans.

“It will also trigger the migration of orangutan to other forests and affect genetics, the reproduction rate and health of orangutans,” he said.

Female orangutans in Kalimantan currently have an interbirth interval of between six and nine years.

Experts warn that orangutans are vulnerable to malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis and cholera.

The rising temperatures is expected to cause a big increase in the number of malaria cases.

The study on the impact of global warming on orangutan habitat in the Sebangau National Park was conducted jointly by the Jakarta-based, privately-run National University and WWF Indonesia in September.

The study says that temperatures in the Sebangau Park would rise by one degree Celsius by 2050 and three degrees by 2100 due to global warming.

Between 2000 and 2003, temperatures in the park were between 21 to 23 degrees Celsius.

The WWF will present the findings of the study at the international climate-change conference in Bali in December, which will be attended by representatives of the 191 signatories to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

Sri Suci Utami, an orangutan researcher from the National University, said that extensive land clearance and illegal logging had significantly reduced the orangutan population.

“Without global warming, orangutans are already very vulnerable to extinction thanks to rampant forest fires and illegal logging,” she said.

“Thus, global warming could further expedite the loss of orangutan habitat unless the government takes immediate protective measures,” she said.

The Sebangau Park is a combination of mixed swampy forest, transitional forest, lowland canopy forest and granite forest, where 106 species of birds, 35 mammals and several groups of primates can be found.

The government designated the Sebangau National Park as a conservation forest in 2004.

Sri, however, warned that those who cleared land by fire would use the global warming issue to expand their businesses as they could blame global warming for the loss of orangutan habitat.

The use of fire to clear land both for commercial and agricultural purposes is widely practiced in Indonesia.

The severe El Nino-induced drought in 1997-1998 led to a massive fire disaster that killed many orangutans.

“We estimate that about 2.5 percent of the 14,000 orangutans in Kalimantan were lost during the forest fires in the 1990s,” Sri said.

In addition, major forest fires in 2006 also killed about 1,000 orangutans. To make it worse, most of the dead orangutans were mothers and their offspring.

“Female and young orangutans will be the most vulnerable as they have the greatest difficulty in escaping,” said Sri.

The study recommends the establishment of monitoring stations to oversee orangutan populations, including their daily activities and food supply.

It is also recommended that local people be involved in the protection efforts being carried out in the Sebangau National Park.

Source: The Jakarta Post

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) — Rebels have seized an area in eastern Congo that serves as a wildlife habitat for endangered mountain gorillas, threatening one of the last known populations of the animals, conservationists said Sunday.

Shelling and heavy gunfire could be heard from the headquarters of the Virunga National Park, and rangers were forced to flee over the weekend, said the international conservation group WildlifeDirect.

Only 700 mountain gorillas exist in the world, of which more than half live in the Virunga conservation area, a huge swath of territory at the intersection of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

Rebels loyal to warlord Laurent Nkunda have frequently battled over the park in their clashes with the army. Caught in the crossfire are the rare gorillas, 10 of which have been killed this year.

“This is a human conflict that is involving the mountain gorillas. They are not a target, but can so easily get caught in crossfire and shelling,” said Emmanuel de Merode, the director of the international conservation group WildlifeDirect.

“We still cannot protect our gorillas. This conflict has no place in the park, least of all in the habitat of these animals. We hope they will be unharmed,” said Norbert Mushenzi, director of the southern section of the park for the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature.

The area containing the mountain gorillas was also attacked in January, when two silverbacks were killed. Four months ago, the dead body of a female gorilla was found. Conservationists say she was killed execution style.

International wildlife groups concerned about the welfare of the gorillas are funding a $100,000-crisis management program to increase the number of rangers patrolling the habitat.

“This appalling security situation is making it virtually impossible to implement the emergency program. There is a lot that we need to be doing, and we simply cant,” said Lucy Fauveau of the London Zoological Society.

Earlier this month, hundreds of people, including rangers and their families, fled the park after fighting broke out. Wildlife groups said huge swaths of the park, including several patrol posts, had been occupied by Nkunda’s insurgents and looted.

Since then, Nkunda’s forces allowed a handful of rangers back to track the gorillas and they accounted for 18 of the estimated 72 mountain gorillas on the Congo side of the park, WildlifeDirect said.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/africa/10/07/congo.gorillas.ap/index.html

Green campaign dents palm oil demand

By Naveen Thukral
Mon Oct 1, 2007

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A campaign by environment groups against palm oil is costing the product market share in Europe, a top Malaysian palm oil industry official said on Monday.

Palm oil, used as food and in products ranging from cosmetics to biofuel, has come under fire from environmentalists in Europe and America who say the rapid expansion in palm cultivation is responsible for vanishing tropical forests and wildlife.

“Trade will take note if negative campaigns are launched against a particular commodity, especially if it creates a lot of uncertainty,” said Yusof Basiron, chief executive of industry-funded Malaysian Palm Oil Council.

“When you bash a product then some people will stay away from it and when you reduce demand, obviously the price tends to weaken.”

Scientists have warned biofuels are likely to speed up global warming as they have encouraged farmers to burn tropical forests that have absorbed a large portion of greenhouse gases.

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

Yusof said oil palm cultivation is not responsible for the destruction of rainforests.

“We grow our oil palm on legitimate agricultural land just like soybean and rapeseed are grown on legitimate agricultural land,” he told Reuters in an interview.

But conservationists are not convinced.

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

The group questions U.K. supermarkets selling palm oil on their corporate social responsibility, and has urged that financiers screen future investments in plantations for adverse environmental affects.

Palm plantations now cover more than 4 million hectares in Malaysia, and firms are expanding fast in neighboring Indonesia where it is grown on some 6 million hectares.

TRADE BARRIER

Official data shows European palm oil imports from Malaysia fell 17.5 percent to 1.32 million tones between January and August this year compared with a year ago period. Over the same period Malaysia’s total palm exports fell 4.5 percent to 5.15 million tones.

“If palm oil exports to Europe are going to be subjected to very stringent sustainability certification while other oilseeds coming from tropical areas are not subjected to such certification then there will be a trade distortion,” said Yusof, who is leading a fight to defend the palm oil industry.

“This will create a trade barrier of some sort.”

Palm oil, produced mainly in Malaysia and Indonesia, has almost doubled in price since January 2006, but still sells at a $60 discount to soybean oil and around a $300 discount to rapeseed oil.

On Monday, the benchmark December contract (KPOZ7: Quote, Profile, Research) on the Bursa Malaysia Derivatives Exchange was quoted at 2,641 ringgit ($779) a ton, just 4 percent shy of an historic high reached in June.

Yusof blamed bad publicity for the discount on palm oil.

“If there is no real reduction in consumption or there is substantial increase in off take, obviously the price discount that we see now will not be there.”

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/GlobalEnvironment07/idUSKLR29694520071001

October 7, 2007

JAKARTA (AP): Indonesia, which is losing its forests faster than any other country, hopes to plant 79 million trees in a single day ahead of a major U.N. climate change meeting later this year, a forestry ministry spokesman said Friday.

“We aim to get Indonesia greener as soon as we can and reduce forest degradation as much as possible,” said Masyhud, who goes by a single name.

The trees, mostly eucalyptus and teak, will be planted across the world’s fourth largest nation on Nov. 28, he said. The country’s president will take part in the campaign, said Masyhud.

Masyhud said saplings would be distributed in advance to more than 70,000 villages across the country, where community elders, government officials and villagers would plant them.

Environmental group Greenpeace said in May that Indonesia was losing its forests faster than any other country, with the equivalent of about 300 soccer pitches destroyed every hour. The forestry ministry did not contest the statement.

Around 1.8 million hectares of forest were destroyed each year between 2000 and 2005, a rate of 2 percent annually or 51 square kilometers a day, the group said.

In addition to massive commercial logging for timber, Indonesian forests are also being decimated by fires and land clearing for palm oil plantations.

Masyhud said that since 2003 the government has launched several conservation initiatives, including signing agreements with Japan and the European Union banning the import of illegally logged products.

Indonesia will host a major U.N. climate change meeting in December on the resort island of Bali. Environment ministers from 80 countries will meet there to begin talks on what actions the world must take after the first commitment period of the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. (**)

Source: The Jakarta Post

I confront them head-on in one of the few places where they still exist.
By Barry Neild, 5 October 2007

For me, there’s never been a more chilling movie than Planet of the Apes, particularly the harrowing moment when a bedraggled Charlton Heston stumbles upon what’s left of the Statue of Liberty and realizes he’s trapped in a future where monkeys have enslaved mankind. Call me paranoid, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is where we’re headed. Daily newspapers across Asia are filled with tales of simian outrage, from pick-pocketing apes to the shadowy monkeyman — an apocryphal creature whose rumored existence sparked widespread panic several summers ago in Delhi. If that’s not enough, a more recent warning came when a friend traveling through India needed to be pumped full of anti-bacterial drugs after a malevolent monkey sank its gnashers deep into his unsuspecting buttocks.

With this in mind, I’ve always given a wide berth to apes, chimps, gorillas, and their ilk — I know they’re supposed to be man’s closest relatives but, let’s face it, no one enjoys a family reunion. Unfortunately, my wife fails to share this point of view, pouring scorn on my claims that monkey scientists are toiling in jungle laboratories to further man’s downfall. Humans, she says, are the bad guys, driving apes to the brink of extinction by hounding them from the treetops and destroying their habitat.

It was with the hope of dispelling such monkey propaganda that I found myself aboard a narrow wooden klotok on the tidal waters of the Sekonyer River in Indonesian Borneo, chugging deep into the heart of a monkey darkness known as Tanjung Putting — a national park that is home to possibly the largest population of orangutans, one of the planet’s so-called “great” apes.

Despite a hair-raising ride on an ancient aircraft to Pankalan Bun, the tiny river port that operates as the gateway to the forests of southern Borneo, navigating the Sekonyer is a pleasure. Mangroves of nipa palm spring from the riverbank, forming the base of a lush and leafy canopy that echoes the rasping calls of hornbills. A cooling breeze keeps mosquitoes at bay while an equatorial sun overhead slips in and out of grumbling monsoon clouds.

All is not well, however, according to Nanang, our English-speaking guide who has some interesting ideas of his own about monkeys. (More on that later.) The river’s milky-brown color means that upriver, the jungle is being torn up by illegal gold miners. It’s a problem that has thankfully been eradicated further into Tanjung Puting, where natural tannin-darkened waterways run the color of freshly poured Guinness.

Our first stop is Tanjung Harapan, a rough collection of huts in a sandy riverside clearing. Harapan is one of a network of bases in the national park that have been set up to rehabilitate orangutans rescued from captivity, with the aim of preserving a species that is believed to have once roamed as far afield as southern China, but is now reduced to a few pockets on Borneo and the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

It’s feeding time at Harapan. We follow one of the park rangers into a deep jungle thicket, dodging armies of angry fire ants to a table where bananas have been laid out. Nanang joins the ranger in hollering out a series of Tarzan calls that are rewarded within minutes by something crashing through the nearby canopy.

“This is Kacong,” whispers Nanang, as a hairy orange beast swings down from the treetops.

Okay, I’ll admit it: My first encounter with a wild orangutan is a little bit exhilarating. This is due to the realization that Kacong’s muscular arms could rip me limb from limb if he so wished and, judging by the dark looks from under his crag-like brow, he might just wish.

The orangutan’s appearance at the feeding table is, says Nanang, a cause for concern. Ideally the apes should be able to sustain themselves from the surrounding jungle. But as more and more trees are lost to illegal logging and farmers’ clearing land for lucrative but ecologically dubious palm oil plantations, the orangutans have become reliant on handouts.

“You cannot say this is a success,” said Nanang, allowing us all to absorb the gravity of the situation before adding rather unexpectedly, “I was sexually assaulted by an orangutan once. It tried to have sex with my leg.”

As the sun begins to sink, we return to the boat, ploughing further upriver beside trees teeming with proboscis monkeys — an unfortunately snouted ape unique to Borneo that even I have to admit looks incapable of getting up to anything more malicious than a few high-spirited japes.

Our evening destination is the Rimba Lodge, a series of huts that rise on stilts from the mangroves to form a charming and, according to its owners, environmentally friendly 35-room hotel. Given its remote location, the lodge is surprisingly comfortable, but annoyingly is also home to an unruly family of macaque monkeys, who seem to take unbridled glee in scuttling loudly across wooden rooftops.

As the only place in the national park licensed to serve beer, Rimba is the perfect spot to sit and discuss the day’s ape sightings, and for Nanang to outline more of his own unorthodox studies into monkey behavior, which follow a familiar theme.

“I’ve been watching a lot of monkey sex,” he confides. “I’ve even made a video. Perhaps I could sell it.”

Apes, says Nanang, can be categorized according to their sexual preferences. Macaques have sex with anything that moves while proboscis are known as the “Viagra monkeys” — one male will mate with a succession of females in sustained bouts of promiscuity. Orangutans, meanwhile, “have sex with style.”

The next day, Nanang defers to more highbrow anthropological expertise when we run into Professor Birute Mary Galdikas. Galdikas is a Canadian-born scientist who has devoted her life to studying orangutans as a protégé of celebrated paleontologist Louis Leakey, whose legendary “Leakey’s Angels” also included chimp expert Jane Goodall and the late Dian “Gorillas in the Mist” Fossey.

Galdikas, who first arrived on the banks of the Sekonyer in 1971, returns regularly to Borneo to check on the orangutans she counts as some of her closest friends, and to oversee some of the programs to save them from obliteration. After accompanying her to watch another formidable feeding display, I drop by her house to ask what fuels her ape obsession.

“There’s something about their eyes, something eerily human about them,” she says, as Pedro, a 250-pound male lumbers up and glowers at me darkly. I stare back in a way I hope is eerily simian.

Our second night in Borneo is spent on board the boat after we sail downstream out of the national park. Comfortable mattresses are unrolled on the open deck, but our only protection from the jungle night is a rather ragged mosquito net.

Nevertheless, after 48 hours in their company, I’m feeling a little more relaxed in my attitude towards apes — perhaps they do have more pressing things to worry about than the subjugation of mankind. Also, Nanang assures me as he turns out the lights, we’re too far down river to attract any unwanted sexual advances from orangutans, macaques, or proboscis.

Then, from out of the inky void, comes a loud and ominous whoop.

“Gibbons,” says Nanang. “I’m not sure about gibbons.”

Source: http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article10050701.aspx

For information on how to contact Nanang, or to learn more about his tours, please contact Richard Zimmerman, the Director of Orangutan Outreach.