Forget petroleum. The next planet-destroying fuel is already here.

By Heather Rogers
Source: Mother Jones
March/April 2009

Nestled deep in the tropical rainforest on the island of Borneo, Pareh is a collection of about 60 weathered wooden houses perched on stilts and enfolded by coconut palms, banana trees, and the dappled green overhang of the towering forest. Pareh’s inhabitants belong to the indigenous tribes of Borneo collectively identified as the Dayak. They have lived here for centuries, raising rubber trees, pumpkin, cassava, and rice, and harvesting wood for fuel and lumber.

In 2005, a group of village men went hunting in the forest several hours from Pareh and stumbled on a clearing in which the trees had recently been felled. That was how they discovered that Perseroan Terbatas Ledo Lestari, or ptll, a subsidiary of an Indonesian company named Duta Palma Nusantara, was seizing their ancestral land to establish a massive plantation of oil palms, a tree whose oil is rendered and refined into biodiesel. (One of Duta Palma’s major customers is Wilmar International Ltd, a Singapore-based firm in which US agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland holds a 16 percent stake.)

Over the next two years ptll destroyed 15,000 acres, which the Dayak say amounts to three-quarters of their “customary forest”—land that’s vital for their survival and to which they have certain rights under Indonesian law. The plantation also uprooted monkeys and wild boar, which began raiding the community’s food supply. Because ptll replaced diverse forest with a monocrop, pests invaded Pareh’s subsistence gardens. Rice crops failed. The Dayak filed complaints with regional and national officials; at one point they commandeered one of ptll’s bulldozers (an offense for which Momonus, the village head, and Jamaluddin, an elder, served jail time). The clearing went on.

Increasingly desperate, in 2007 the people of Pareh offered ptll a drastic compromise. The villagers would surrender every acre the plantation had illegally seized if the company agreed to take no more land. There was no response. Soon after, a villager obtained a ptll map showing the company’s long-term plan: It aimed to clearcut 50,000 acres, more than three times as much land as it had already taken. On the map, both Pareh and its sister village, Semunying, were gone.

Later that fall, a hunting party was searching for wild boar when the men heard the unmistakable whine of chain saws. This time, they didn’t write up a complaint—they assembled a posse. More than 60 people from Pareh and Semunying descended on the site. They found a clearcutting crew in action, protected by Indonesian army troops; by way of protest, they seized 11 chain saws. “If we didn’t do anything, our land would be gone,” a defiant Jamaluddin told me.

With governments and consumers scrambling for alternatives to fossil fuel, worldwide demand for biofuels has gone through the roof; in Europe, where more than half of all automobiles run on diesel, consumption of biodiesel is set to triple by 2010. US subsidies for biofuels, mostly ethanol, will add up to $92 billion between 2006 and 2012, and producers in developing countries like Indonesia are often eligible for millions of dollars in development money from the World Bank.

But amid the hype, problems have emerged. Biodiesel emits less than one-quarter the carbon of regular diesel once it’s burned. But when production—and the destruction of ecosystems in the developing countries where most biofuel crops are grown—is factored in, many biofuels may actually emit more carbon than does petroleum, the journal Science reported last year. Because oil palms don’t absorb as much CO2 as the rainforest or peatlands they replace, palm oil can generate as much as 10 times more carbon than petroleum, according to the advocacy group Food First. Thanks in large part to oil palm plantations, Indonesia is now the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, trailing only the US and China.

Yet Indonesia aims to expand these plantations from 16 million acres currently to almost 26 million by 2015. If deforestation, which is due largely to oil palm, continues at the present rate, 98 percent of the country’s forest—one of only a handful of large rainforests remaining in the world—will be degraded or gone by 2022. And although Indonesia has strict environmental regulations and formally recognizes customary land rights, those laws are only as effective as the local bureaucrats enforcing them. “For the permit certification, a guy just comes to your office and you just pay him off,” explains Ong Kee Chau, a former Wilmar executive who was responsible for most of the company’s operations on Borneo. “This is how it works.” For everyone from national politicians to struggling villagers, biofuel represents opportunity. “Oil palm is one of our areas of competitiveness,” explains Herry Purnomo, an Indonesia-based forestry researcher. “We can’t compete with information technologies or in auto manufacturing, but we have plantations.”

The only way to get to Pareh is to travel up the Kumba River, typically in a traditional wooden boat fitted with an outboard motor. When I make the trip with a researcher from Friends of the Earth-Indonesia, we arrive about two hours after sundown. Momonus and his wife, Margareta, receive us in their home. (The people I meet in Pareh all go by single names.) There is no furniture; we sit in flickering candlelight around plastic tablecloths spread on the floor. Pages of newspaper have been pasted over gaps in the walls, and in one room I read a story about girls being kidnapped and used as sex slaves by plantation workers.

After a meal of fiddlehead ferns and banana flowers, the front room begins to fill with village men who spill out onto the porch and linger in the doorway. All wear freshly washed T-shirts and jeans or khakis, and all of them smoke except Momonus, a 38-year-old with a low, solid build, dark hair, and a thin mustache. The men tell me that if the government and Duta Palma continue to rebuff them, they will resort to their machetes. (The Dayak have a history of head-hunting, although nowadays they mostly use that reputation to inspire fear.) As the meeting winds down, Julian, a young father of two, asks if anyone has been to the boundary between the forest and the plantation. Another young man speaks up. Yes, he was recently there, and didn’t see any logging.

The next day, I go with Momonus, Julian, and two other villagers to see for ourselves. On motorbikes, we navigate the ribbon of slick mud that passes for a road. After two perilous hours, we reach the land Duta Palma has seized.

The contrast between past and future is extreme. The ancestral forest is carpeted with ferns and flowers; monkeys swing from branches of wild mango, teak, and ironwood trees, and soaring above it all is a majestic canopy of dipterocarps. One of the rainforest’s iconic treasures, dipterocarps bloom just once every four years but do so in unison, their vivid red flowers erupting over millions of acres.

Across the road is a moonscape. Charred trunks lie prone as far as the eye can see. On the horizon we can make out a thin emerald seam—the encroaching column of palms. Duta Palma has also planted seedlings in a narrow band along the border of the community’s land, like a message written in green: The forest belongs to the palm.

We pass the area denuded last fall, and the empty military guard post set up to protect the loggers. Farther along we find a camp. A blue tarp is pitched over a platform covered with bedding and folded clothes. Momonus lifts the lid on a pot of rice; it’s still warm. He takes a stub of wood from the cooking fire and writes on the platform in thick black letters: Stop destroying the ancestral forest!!!

We hit the road again. After a few miles, we come to an abrupt halt—several recently downed trees are blocking the way. As the drone of chain saws reverberates, a few workers emerge from the trees. Unlike the people of Pareh, they have tattered clothes and black teeth. Momonus calmly exchanges words with one of them and heads into the forest to see what’s going on. When he returns 10 minutes later, his eyes shine with rage. Then another man, better dressed than the laborers, comes barreling toward us on a white motorcycle. He, too, looks furious. Momonus orders us on the bikes, and we speed away. When we finally stop, Momonus reminds me where I’ve seen the man before. He was the villager at the meeting last night who said the clearing had stopped. He is Momonus’ brother-in-law.

I have just witnessed the palm companies’ modus operandi in miniature. Operatives will proposition community members to assemble a logging crew in return for a sum that is insignificant to the company and a fortune to a villager. Some people will say no—Julian refused $6,000. But the company will keep trying until someone says yes, and someone almost always does. This helps the plantations expand into the forests, but, even more important, it sows betrayal and division that undermine the opposition.

A few days later, I get a text message from Momonus saying that the community went back to the clearing and confiscated 20 chain saws.

is there any hope for Indonesia’s rainforests—and the people who depend on them? To answer that question, I visit an older oil palm plantation, Perseroan Terbatas Bumi Pratama Khatulistiwa. It’s owned by Wilmar and located in the coastal district of Pontianak, near the village of Mega Timur. This terrain used to be tropical peatland forest, but in 1996, Wilmar began razing the groves and digging deep canals to drain the soil. Now the land is a uniform grid of oil palms. According to Greenpeace, the destruction and degradation of Indonesian peatlands releases 4 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Unlike the Dayak of Pareh, the peasants of Mega Timur welcomed the plantation, seeing it as their ticket to a better life. Many families agreed to surrender their land to Wilmar; each received in exchange a smaller plot sown with palm, with the cost of the planting passed on to the family in the form of a loan. This is a common arrangement that somewhat resembles sharecropping: The peasants are obliged to sell their harvest to the company at a set price, regardless of the market rate. The Wilmar plantation siphons off half the money as payments on the planting loans; it also deducts fees for roads and drainage systems, fertilizer and pesticides, harvest collection, security and administrative charges, and a deposit into a mandatory savings account. After almost a decade of working with the company, none of the smallholders I talk to know how much they’ve earned, how much they’ve saved, or what portion of their loans they’ve paid. They do know, however, that floods are common now that the wetlands are gone. Several times a year their fields are submerged, sometimes for weeks on end.

Wilmar is currently under scrutiny for illegalities at three other plantations, including logging protected areas, using fire to clear trees, forcibly removing peasants and indigenous people, and operating without proper permits. These activities violate Wilmar’s own social responsibility policies, as well as the standards of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an industry-led oversight group the company belongs to, and the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank agency that has provided Wilmar tens of millions of dollars. After considerable pressure from Indonesian activists, both agencies have launched investigations. The industry group’s probe ended last year after Wilmar promised to make improvements.

My last stop in Indonesia is the Center for International Forestry Research, a serene, wooded compound where more than 100 top scientists are working out ways to protect the world’s forests and their peoples. Researcher Herry Purnomo is part of an international team that has devised a plan to pay developing countries to leave the trees standing. Known as the Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation initiative, the program is projected to cost a mere $12 billion annually worldwide—not bad considering that the US government has spent $126 billion on post-Katrina reconstruction. But international agencies and Western governments have promised only $1 billion so far—”nowhere near what there needs to be,” Purnomo says with frustration.

While I was in Pareh, some village men asked if I wanted to see the 11 chain saws they’d seized the previous fall. They led me to a hiding place and took out the orange-handled saws one by one, carefully placing them in a straight line on the ground. A few minutes later they meticulously arranged them in a circle. I could tell how proud they were: The chain saws were trophies of their bravery. I also realized that despite all they’d been through, the villagers continued to see the saws as bargaining chips, a monumental misperception of the size and scope of their opponent.

By Angus Whitley and Tien Hin Chan

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) — Sime Darby Bhd., the world’s biggest palm oil producer, said fiscal second-quarter profit sank 65 percent as the price of the commodity slumped from a record.

Net income dropped to 278.5 million ringgit ($76 million), or 4.63 sen a share, in the three months ended Dec. 31, from 800 million ringgit, or 13.27 sen, a year earlier. Sales fell 10 percent to 7.3 billion ringgit, Sime said in a statement today.

Chief Executive Officer Ahmad Zubir Murshid said the global slowdown will lead to lower sales at the group’s property, car and industrial-equipment divisions. The Kuala Lumpur-based company reiterated that earnings this fiscal year will fall, though will be “satisfactory.”

“The second half of the financial year is expected to be very challenging” the company said in the statement. “We are operating in a global economic environment that has weakened considerably. Sime Darby has doubled its efforts to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs.”

Sime Darby shares, which have gained 11 percent this year, today added 0.9 percent to 5.75 ringgit. The results were released after the Kuala Lumpur stock exchange closed.

The price of palm oil, which is mostly used in cooking though can be added to diesel to make a biofuel, surged to a record in March last year on growing demand from India and China, the oil’s largest consumers. The price has since slumped as the global recession raised concern demand for commodities will fall.

Palm oil, which reached 4,486 ringgit a metric ton on March 4, today lost 0.2 percent to 1,890 ringgit in Malaysia, the world’s second-largest producer after Indonesia.

Source: Bloomberg

By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: February 25, 2009
See more at the source: The New York Times

Americans like their toilet tissue soft: exotic confections that are silken, thick and hot-air-fluffed.
The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra — which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent in some markets, according to Information Resources, Inc., a marketing research firm.

But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.

Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. “Recycled fiber cannot do it.”

The country’s soft-tissue habit — call it the Charmin effect — has not escaped the notice of environmentalists, who are increasingly making toilet tissue manufacturers the targets of campaigns. Greenpeace on Monday for the first time issued a national guide for American consumers that rates toilet tissue brands on their environmental soundness. With the recession pushing the price for recycled paper down and Americans showing more willingness to repurpose everything from clothing to tires, environmental groups want more people to switch to recycled toilet tissue.

“No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper,” said Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council.

In the United States, which is the largest market worldwide for toilet paper, tissue from 100 percent recycled fibers makes up less than 2 percent of sales for at-home use among conventional and premium brands. Most manufacturers use a combination of trees to make their products. According to RISI, an independent market analysis firm in Bedford, Mass., the pulp from one eucalyptus tree, a commonly used tree, produces as many as 1,000 rolls of toilet tissue. Americans use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year.

Other countries are far less picky about toilet tissue. In many European nations, a rough sheet of paper is deemed sufficient. Other countries are also more willing to use toilet tissue made in part or exclusively from recycled paper.

In Europe and Latin America, products with recycled content make up about on average 20 percent of the at-home market, according to experts at the Kimberly Clark Corporation.

Environmental groups say that the percentage is even higher and that they want to nurture similar acceptance here. Through public events and guides to the recycled content of tissue brands, they are hoping that Americans will become as conscious of the environmental effects of their toilet tissue use as they are about light bulbs or other products.

Dr. Hershkowitz is pushing the high-profile groups he consults with, including Major League Baseball, to use only recycled toilet tissue. At the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday, the gowns were designer originals but the toilet tissue at the Kodak Theater’s restrooms was 100 percent recycled.

Environmentalists are focusing on tissue products for reasons besides the loss of trees. Turning a tree to paper requires more water than turning paper back into fiber, and many brands that use tree pulp use polluting chlorine-based bleach for greater whiteness. In addition, tissue made from recycled paper produces less waste tonnage — almost equaling its weight — that would otherwise go to a landfill.

Still, trees and tree quality remain a contentious issue. Although brands differ, 25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests, which are an irreplaceable habitat for a variety of endangered species, environmental groups say.

Greenpeace, the international conservation organization, contends that Kimberly Clark, the maker of two popular brands, Cottonelle and Scott, has gotten as much as 22 percent of its pulp from producers who cut trees in Canadian boreal forests where some trees are 200 years old.

But Dave Dickson, a spokesman for Kimberly Clark, said that only 14 percent of the wood pulp used by the company came from the boreal forest and that the company contracted only with suppliers who used “certified sustainable forestry practices.”

Lisa Jester, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble, the maker of Charmin, points out that the Forest Products Association of Canada says that no more than 0.5 percent of its forest is harvested annually. Still, even the manufacturers concede that the main reason they have not switched to recycled material is that those fibers tend to be shorter than fibers from standing trees. Long fibers can be laid out and fluffed to make softer tissue.

Jerry Baker, vice president of product and technology research for Kimberly Clark, said the company was not philosophically opposed to recycled products and used them for the “away from home” market, which includes restaurants, offices and schools.

But people who buy toilet tissue for their homes — even those who identify themselves as concerned about the environment — are resistant to toilet tissue made from recycled paper.

With a global recession, however, that may be changing. In the past few months, sales of premium toilet paper have plunged 7 percent nationally, said Ali Dibadj, a senior stock analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, a financial management firm, providing an opening for makers of recycled products.

Marcal, the oldest recycled-paper maker in the country, emerged from bankruptcy under new management last year with a plan to spend $30 million on what is says will be the first national campaign to advertise a toilet tissue’s environmental friendliness. Marcal’s new chief executive, Tim Spring, said the company had seen intense interest in the new product from chains like Walgreens. The company will introduce the new toilet tissue in April, around Earth Day

Mr. Spring said Marcal would be able to price the new tissue below most conventional brands, in part because of the lower cost of recycled material.

“Our idea is that you don’t have to spend extra money to save the Earth,” he said. “And people want to know what happens to the paper they recycle. This will give them closure.”

Morning Edition, February 20, 2009 · At the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., Bonnie the orangutan has been amazing researchers with her special talent: Bonnie knows how to whistle.

Those notes are a symphony to the ears of primate researchers who believe her musical abilities could lead to a greater understanding of how human speech evolved.

“I think what makes it significant is that you can train apes to whistle, but no one trained her to do it. She decided to do it on her own,” says Erin Stromberg, who works in the National Zoo’s Great Ape house and helps care for the orangutans.

Stromberg helped publish a recent paper on Bonnie’s talents. Researchers believe Bonnie was trying to imitate the sounds of zookeepers who whistle while they work. Stromberg says Bonnie’s ability to copy that sound is powerful evidence that apes can re-create the sounds of other species.

“So what’s significant about Bonnie learning to whistle is not that she’s able to do it, it’s that she saw someone else do it and just picked it up,” Stromberg says.

Bonnie is 32 years old, with dark orange hair and a big round belly, and weighs in at a svelte 140 pounds. She lives in a concrete enclosure with plenty of things to climb up and swing down. A large window allows spectators to look in, and Bonnie to look right back at them.

Bonnie has been mimicking her zookeepers’ movements for years. She likes to sweep the floors and wash the windows, although she uses dirty rags to do it.

When she started whistling, researchers decided to test her gift for mimicking sounds. They asked Stromberg to whistle basic patterns to see whether Bonnie could copy them. It turned out to be easier for the ape than for the human — Stromberg isn’t a great whistler — so the researchers kept it simple.

“I would give a long whistle, and would she then in turn imitate me? Or if I do a short whistle, would she do a short whistle? And she would,” Stromberg says. “She was pretty good at following what I was doing. I think what makes it significant is that she decided to do it on her own. Something made her want to whistle, or at least try it out. And so to me, she was challenging herself to do something else.”

See and hear more at the source: NPR

Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com
February 24, 2009

Whole Foods pledges to use only sources of palm oil that have been independently verified and certified to meet environmental and social sustainability criteria in its private label brand products by 2012.

America’s largest organic grocer has announced its products will no longer use palm oil sourced from unsustainable producers, reports the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), an activist group that has led a campaign against destructive palm oil production. The move adds pressure on the palm oil industry to develop an effective and credible certification system for palm oil.

“Whole Foods Market is concerned with the social and environmental impacts of palm oil production in tropical rainforest ecosystems around the world,” Whole Foods said in a statement. “Whole Foods is committed to protecting rainforests, communities and our global climate, and therefore Whole Foods has partnered with the Institute for Marketecology (IMO), a highly regarded international certification agency whose social responsibility and fair trade certification program requires successful implementation of environmental, social responsibility, and sustainability practices on the land and within the company’s organization.”

“Whole Foods Market pledges to use IMO’s reliable certification program, along with independent supply chain verification, in the sourcing of palm oil in our private label products. Whole Foods Market pledges to support the development of more sources of sustainable, fairly traded palm oil, to ensure that palm oil in our private label brand products are not sourced from the conversion of rainforest ecosystems or from companies engaged in the conversion of natural forests and/or peatlands; respect the free, prior and informed consent of interested communities and meet or exceed RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) principles and criteria.”

“Whole Foods Market pledges that it will only use sources of palm oil independently verified and certified to these criteria in our private label brand products by 2012. Whole Foods Market calls on our peers in the food industry to join with us in this pledge.”

RAN welcomed the decision.

“With the statement on their website, Whole Foods Market is sending a clear signal that they do not want to be associated with the destruction of rainforests due to the expansion of oil palm plantations,” said Leila Salazar-Lopez, director of RAN’s Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign. “We applaud Whole Foods for their leadership and urge other companies and palm oil suppliers to add their voices to this call for change in the U.S. palm oil supply chain.”

In recent years the palm oil industry has been criticized by environmentalists due to a spate of reports and studies showing that palm oil production in Southeast Asia is driving large-scale destruction of rainforests and peatlands, putting rare and endangered species like the orangutan, the flat-headed cat, and pygmy elephants at risk. Further, conversion of natural ecosystems for oil palm plantations has been associated with the emissions of hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases.

Some palm oil producers have responded to criticism by forming the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a certification initiative that seeks to improve the environmental performance of the palm oil industry. The effort has been slow to get off the ground, beset by infighting and controversy, but many environmentalists believe RSPO is the best hope for bringing sustainability to the palm oil industry. The Whole Foods announcement is yet another impetus for the iniative: Unilever — the world’s largest corporate buyer of palm oil — has lately been particularly active in pushing for a credible certification system and dozens of food, cosmetic and consumer goods companies have signed RAN’s pledge.

February 25, 2009
Fidelis E. Satriastanti

The new ministerial regulation allowing peatland forests to be converted into palm oil plantations not only poses a risk to the environment, but will also encourage conflict between local villagers and plantation owners, an advocacy group says.

Edi Sutrisno, head of campaigning and public education for the NGO Sawit Watch, said on Tuesday that the Ministry of Agriculture’s regulation could conflict with still-pending rules on spatial planning, leading to increased confrontations at the village level.

“The spatial planning regulation — to be drawn up by the provincial governments — was supposed to be finished prior to the ministry regulation so that those areas meant for industry could be distinguished from protected areas,” he said. “In the absence of this regulation, we have already seen many permit violations, and this will only get worse.”

He said villagers “will be confused and defensive because they will see that even though spatial planning hasn’t been completed, the palm oil producers have already been given the permits to manage what the villagers still see as their land.”

Over the objections of environmentalists, the ministry last week ended a year-long freeze on clearing peatlands for plantations but cut the total amount of qualifying forests from four million hectares to two million.

The government closed peatlands for agricultural conversion last year amid widespread protest from environmentalists, who have urged that the freeze be maintained. The Indonesia Palm Oil Producers Association, which represents 250 plantations, rejected the moratorium last year and had continued to oppose it.

Bustar Maistar, a forest campaigner for Greenpeace Indonesia, said the ministry had acted too quickly in making a new regulation, basing it on incomplete studies.

“It is still premature. The new regulation simply strengthens the old one,” he said, adding that the ministry itself “admitted that their studies on greenhouse gas effects were incomplete.”

Achmad Mangga Barani, director general of plantations at the Ministry of Agriculture, allowed that his office had not finished a study on emissions but said “we will work on it while information on the regulation is made public.”

Edi also called the environmental viability of the decision into question. He said the regulation — which could allow at least 70 percent of those areas with a peat depth of less than three meters to be turned into plantations — was further proof of government inconsistency.

“The peatlands must be seen as a whole ecosystem; there are no specific borders for it,” he said.

Achmad countered by saying that Indonesia had around 20 million hectares of peatlands, mostly in Sumatra and Kalimantan, yet only 10 percent qualify under the regulation to become palm oil plantations.

“There’s only going to be about two or three millions hectares with a peat depth of less than three meters,” he said.

But Edi said the government was flouting requirements of transparency by not revealing the results of their studies.

“If are talking about only two million hectares of peatland forest, where are those places?” he asked.

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/article/11190.html

Wed Feb 25, 2009

JAKARTA, Feb 25 (Reuters) – Indonesia needs to urgently halt the destruction of forests in Sumatra, conservation group WWF said on Wednesday, after six people were attacked and killed by rare tigers in Jambi province in less than a month.

“As people encroach into tiger habitat, it’s creating a crisis situation and further threatening this critically endangered subspecies,” Ian Kosasih, director of WWF’s Forest Programme, said in a statement.

Further illustrating the conflict between humans and endangered tigers, three young tigers were killed by villagers this month in Riau province, also in Sumatra, apparently after they strayed into a village in search of food, WWF said.

On Sunday, a tiger attacked and killed a man carrying logs near an illegal logging camp in Jambi in eastern Sumatra, Didy Wurjanto, head of the Jambi nature conservation agency said.

Two other illegal loggers in the same area were mauled and killed on Saturday.

Authorities had trapped a female tiger believed to be behind three killings earlier this month in the area, Wurjanto told Reuters, but the capture had not stopped the latest killings.

“In light of these killings, officials have got to make public safety a top concern and put a stop to illegal clearance of forests in Sumatra,” said WWF’s Kosasih.

About 12 million hectares (29.65 million acres) of Sumatran forest has been cleared in the past 22 years, a loss of nearly 50 percent islandwide, according to WWF.

The Sumatran tiger is the most critically endangered of the world’s tiger subspecies.

Forest clearance often for palm oil or logging, killings due to human-tiger conflict, and illegal hunting for the trade in their parts, have led to tiger numbers halving to an estimated 400-500 or less on the Indonesian island from an estimated 1,000 in the 1970s, conservationists say.

(Reporting by Ed Davies and Telly Nathalia; Editing by Valerie Lee)

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSJAK417952