July 29, 2009
Fidelis E. Satriastanti The Jakarta Globe

Sinar Mas Blamed For Riau Haze

As the haze from burning forests and plantations continues to choke Riau, nongovernmental organizations are pointing the finger at the Sinar Mas Group and urging it to take immediate action to deal with the disaster, an environmentalist said on Tuesday.

“[Sinar Mas] and its associated companies should take their legal responsibility as license holders seriously and prevent such fires on their concessions, regardless who caused the fires,” said Susanto Kurniawan of Jikalahari.

An analysis carried out by a local coalition of NGOs called Eyes on the Forest shows that 4,782 fire hotspots occurred in Riau in the first six months of 2009 and that nearly one-quarter of those fires were found within concessions affiliated with Sinar Mas Group’s Asia Pulp and Paper Company, including within a conservation reserve set up by the group.

The Sinar Mas and the pulp and paper company received a conservation achievement award for designating the Giam Siak Kecil-Bukit Batu forest as a Unesco Biosphere Reserve. However, data shows that of the fires originating in Sinar Mas connected concessions, many of them are actually in the original GSK forest block.

Biosphere reserves are conservation areas created to protect the biological and cultural diversity of a region while promoting sustainable economic development.

“Whether through fires, draining peatlands or forest clearance in its wood-sourcing concessions, Sinar Mas Group companies are the single biggest contributors to the destruction of natural forest and peat soil in the ecosystem where the Biosphere Reserve was established,” said Nursamsu of WWF-Indonesia.

Meanwhile, Hariansyah Usman of Walhi Riau, said the forests were often cleared without proper licensing and sometimes inside provincial protection areas.

“We call on the government to reopen the findings of the recently terminated illegal logging investigation. We also call on the government to take legal action against companies that start fires,” said Hariansyah, adding that 13 cases of illegal logging by pulp and paper companies were dropped by police in 2008.

Meanwhile, Nurul Huda, a spokesman for Sinar Mas Group, said the claims made by the NGOs were not true and needed to be proven.

“It’s absurd, we did suspect a few hotspots in our areas, however, after we checked them for real, they turned out to be nothing,” he said adding that if there were hotspots, the company’s fire fighters would have taken the necessary steps to put them out.

Concerning the conservation areas, he said that the company would never cut down trees or carry out burning in those areas because they were part of the company’s conservation efforts.

http://thejakartaglobe.com/news/sinar-mas-blamed-for-riau-haze/320785

Crisis care and improved husbandry standards at orangutan rehabilitation centers in Borneo and Sumatra will be the focus when more than 35 local veterinarians, keepers and wildlife officials gather for the Orangutan Conservancy (OC) Veterinary Workshop, which will be held August 5-9 in East Kalimantan, Borneo.

The workshop is designed to specifically target the Indonesian and Malay staff members that work with orphaned orangutans on a daily basis. More than 1,500 orangutans currently reside at sanctuaries in Borneo and Sumatra, many bearing critical injuries and illnesses as a result of their capture from the forest.

The OC Veterinary Workshop is sponsored by the Orangutan Conservancy, a U.S.-based organization that supports a variety of orangutan field projects, along with the Chester Zoo, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and the Birmingham (Alabama) Chapter of the American Association of Zoo Keepers (AAZK).

The OC Veterinary Workshop will be led by Chester Zoo veterinarian Steve Unwin, who believes that creating alliances between local staff members in southeast Asia is as important as seminars on disease risk-analysis or nutrition.

“For the first time ever, Indonesian and Malaysian wildlife vets working with orangutans will be brought together in an atmosphere of partnership, to learn from international experts and more importantly, each other,” Unwin said. “This is the first step to working as a team to provide the best possible coordinated healthcare to the orangutan conservation efforts currently being undertaken.”

Among the agenda items are presentations on tuberculosis, hepatitis, parasitology, blood-typing, and discussions on the healthcare requirements associated with the reintroduction of orangutans back into the wild.

The OC Veterinary Workshop will be staged at the Samboja Lestari rehabilitation center, and will include delegates from each of the other rehabilitation centers in Indonesia and Malaysia. Local universities and regional and national wildlife authorities will also attend.

The Orangutan Conservancy is planning to make the Veterinary Workshop an annual event, and hopes it will foster a crisis-care community that will ultimately benefit the orphaned orangutans.

“Many veterinarians and orangutan-care workers spend years in the field, isolated from valuable social networks,” said Dr. Raffaella Commitante, vice-president of OC. “Sharing information across sites and continents is key to managing the many orangutans that have been disenfranchised because of capture for the pet trade and forest destruction. It is our hope that through this workshop, relationships and alliances will be built and maintained over the years to come providing everyone with much needed updates on health and management issues both in situ and out.”

The Orangutan Conservancy was established in 1999 to support projects that focus on wild orangutan protection; reintroduction; education; and research. The Orangutan Conservancy is a partner of the Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP). For more information, please visit www.orangutan.com or contact click to email.

Learn more: http://www.orangutan.net/archives/200

July 28, 2009
Ahmad Maryudi Jakarta Globe

Community forestry has widely been heralded as a way to achieve sustainable forestry, particularly in the developing world. Its introduction in Indonesia was mainly inspired by models in Nepal and India. The approach is meant as an alternative to “scientific” industrial-scale forest management, a system widely perceived to result in forest loss and degradation while failing to contribute to the economic development of local residents.

The main value of community forestry is that it should involve local forest users and inhabitants in the decision making and implementation of forestry activities. The perceived failures of industrial forestry in the developing world have often been attributed to the lack of local people’s involvement. Jack Westoby, a former director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s forestry department and once a proponent of large-scale forestry, later said “forestry is not about trees, it is about people.”

Community forestry aims help forest dwellers out of poverty. Some of the poorest households in the country dwell in or near forests. An estimated 40 million people — nearly a quarter of the country’s population — live in forest villages, and many of them depend almost entirely on forests for subsistence. Some are from indigenous groups living traditional lifestyles. Many more use forests for essential fuel for cooking and heating.

Some current community forestry programs (HKM), such those implemented in some Indonesian islands, and colloborative forest management programs (PHBM) in almost all of Java’s forests, aim to achieve just such goals. But while such programs have been hailed for offering better benefits to forest residents, one can opine that it is the forestry officials who benefit most from these actvities. Some wonder whether these programs are truly aimed at the welfare of forest communities.

Over the years, forestry officials have failed in many of their reforestation efforts, often losing their investment in the early phases. Even if the officials were able to cultivate the stands, experience has shown that they are powerless in preventing their logging by forest residents or outsiders. The massive blight of illegal logging toward the end of the 1990s suggests that forest officials will continue to lose trees if management approaches do not involve forest dwellers.

In community-based programs, forest residents are expected to replant, cultivate and protect stands of new growth. It is rather obvious that officials benefit from these programs in two ways. First, they can reduce or even avoid the cost of “raising” the forests until they are ready for harvest. Second, they claim most of the harvest, a prize that cannot be guaranteed without the cooperation of the community. This has led some critics to refer to PHBMs as “Pengelolaan Hutan Berbiaya Murah,” or “Low-Cost Forest Management.” Such schemes are even more exploitative than previous social forestry programs, which have been said to be no more than “land for labor” deals.

To be fair, forest authorities today offer better economic incentives from the sales of forest products. In PHBM programs, Perhutani, the state forest enterprise in Java, pays a 25 percent share, while HKMs in regions such as Gunungkidul (Yogyakarta) are likely to offer 40 percent. It is an improvement on the past, when social forestry programs offered such limited economic benefits as temporary access to forestland for agricultural cropping and nontimber forest products.

However, experience tells us that proceeds from forest sales are rarely enjoyed by direct forest users. Communities have to wait for years to obtain economic benefits because it takes 40-60 years for stands to reach the harvest stage, depending on the species. Cases have shown that forest officials are reluctant to switch long-rotation species to fast-growing ones.

Even if communities have already received a share of the harvest sales, this money is rarely seen by direct forest users. Gempol, a forest village in Randublatung, Blora, has received about a billion rupiah ($100,000) from the forest authority over the past five years. Less than 5 percent of this sum has been allocated to direct forest users.

In addition, forest resource users are now facing increased difficulty in accessing the forests. In the past, they might have been allowed access for grazing, collecting wood for fuel or even cutting timber for small-scale construction, albeit illegally in the eyes of forest officials. Now, complex permit systems are being set in place that force communities to fall in line.

On the bright side, there are a few exceptional cases. Communities in Krui, Lampung, have been given access for harvesting and collecting both timber and nontimber products, mainly dammar resin. In return, the community has to maintain tree stands in the dammar agroforest area and pay tax on timber and other products that are extracted for commercial purposes. Elsewhere, a community forest in Sungai Utik, West Kalimantan, has successfully obtained a forest stainability certificate from the Indonesian Ecolabeling Institute. Still, public forest access in both cases must be officially approved, and there signs of improved livelihoods are scant.

Community forestry programs have yet to genuinely involve forest dwellers in decision making, leaving local stakeholders left out of discussions on delineating borders, deciding where to plant, choosing species, scheduling rotation cycles and so on. Instead, all decisions are dictated from the top down.

“Bottom-up” schemes tend to include ideas on using faster-growing species that would more quickly benefit users due to short harvest cycles. In addition, the needs of other agricultural spaces in forests are rarely taken into account because of the way they impinge on space for timber species. In Banyumas, Central Java, a proposal to plant coffee in a part of the forest set aside for agriculture failed. Proposals to thin the forest canopy to allow more sunlight to reach crops are often denied, as in the cases of Purworejo and Wonosobo, also in Central Java.

It remains true that programs are still heavily controlled by the state. Prior to implementation, forest dwellers are required to organize in a legally registered group, without which they are prevented from engaging in the programs.

This contradicts regulations that encourage local communities to decide what is best for them. Within forest villages, there are several social organizations that could be employed instead of establishing a new entity. Some analysts even accuse the requirement to establish such groups of being a strategy to control political dynamics within communities.

Despite the best efforts to involve communities in forestry, positive outcomes for forest dwellers have yet to be realized. Despite promising schemes to share profits with local residents, they still only enjoy limited economic benefits, far less than they deserve to compensate for their efforts in caring for the forest.

Policy makers and forest managers should explore ways to genuinely address forest dwellers’ needs and improve public access to forest resources. And the handful of successful programs should be used as models for ushering in new initiatives for forest communities around the country.

Ahmad Maryudi is a lecturer at Gadjah Mada University and the executive director of the Institute for Forest Policy and Environmental Studies.

http://thejakartaglobe.com/opinion/to-create-healthy-forests-put-them-in-the-hands-of-people-who-need-them/320714

Arti Ekawati
The Jakarta Globe

New Rule to Add Indonesian Timber Revenues To Government Coffers

The Ministry of Forestry is preparing a regulation requiring that all timber cut while clearing forest land for commercial use be auctioned by the central government, with the total proceeds going into the state treasury, a ministry official said on Monday.

The plan is aimed at illegal logging by companies who are awarded permits to clear forest land for plantations and other commercial ventures, but who abandon the land after clearing it and sell the valuable timber while paying only small fees to the government.

“It has been the subject of internal discussion at the ministry, and we plan to enact the regulation soon,” Masyhud, the ministry’s head of information, told the Jakarta Globe.

Masyhud said the government earned only small fees for reforestation and forest royalties, while the companies had the right to sell the valuable timber they cut while clearing the land.

“What the government earns from those fees is very insignificant considering the value of the timber [the companies] sold,” Masyhud said.

The ministry’s plan appeared to take some in the industry by surprise.

David, the vice chairman of the Indonesian Forest Entrepreneurs Association, said the ministry should first hold public hearings before implementing a new regulation.

“Some companies might oppose the regulation because they probably think it will reduce their income from selling timber,” he said.

“Each regulation has its own positive and negative effects,” said David, who goes by one name.

“Therefore, all the forestry stakeholders including the government, [nongovernmental organizations] and businessmen, need to sit down and discuss it.”

Elfian Effendi, executive director of the NGO Greenomics, said he supported the regulation as a way to prevent illegal logging. He said some companies operated with criminal intent, securing permits to open plantations in forest areas but abandoning the proposed projects after cutting down and selling all the timber.

“Of course, not all companies do such things, but I think the regulation will be good to avoid the repeated” offenses, Elfian said.

Under current regulations, the government receives only 17.5 percent of the total value of the timber cleared from newly opened forests, while the companies keep 82.5 percent, Elfian said.

Data released by Greenomics showed that 17.5 percent of the 4.6 million hectares of forest nationwide that was released by the Ministry of Forestry for creating plantations was abandoned after being cleared of timber.

“We urge the government to seek answers from the companies as to why they’re abandoning their land,” Elfian said.

He noted that the government planned to soon release an additional 4.2 million hectares of forest for plantation development.

http://thejakartaglobe.com/home/new-rule-to-add-indonesian-timber-revenues-to-government-coffers/320541

26 July 2009

The United States and Indonesian governments signed a debt-for-nature swap agreement that will help preserve threatened forest habitats. The agreement will reduce Indonesia’s debt payments to the U.S. by nearly $30 million over 8 years.

In return, the government of Indonesia will commit these funds to support grants to protect and restore the country’s tropical forests. In partnership with Conservation International and the Indonesian Biodiversity Foundation [Yayasan Keanekaragaman Hayati Indonesia] known as KEHATI, the Tropical Forest Conservation Act agreement will be the first ever in Indonesia as well as the largest debt-for-nature swap of its kind. The agreement is an important element of the Comprehensive Partnership currently being built by the United States and Indonesia.

“Indonesia is one of the most biologically diverse countries on earth,” said U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Cameron Hume. “Funds generated by the debt-for-nature program will help Indonesia protect critical forest habitats in Sumatra.”

Sumatra is home to hundreds of mammal, bird and plant species, many of which are rare or endangered, including the Sumatran tiger, elephant, rhino, and orangutan. The grants are designed to improve natural resource management and conservation efforts, and develop sustainable livelihoods for local people and communities who rely on forests.

The Indonesian agreement marks the 15th Tropical Forest Conservation Act pact, with agreements between the United States and Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Paraguay, the Philippines, and two agreements each with Panama and Peru. Over time, these debt-for-nature programs will together generate over $218 million to protect tropical forests.

KEHATI was established in 1995 to support and facilitate biodiversity conservation in Indonesia. The funds provided will be used to support grants that will conserve and restore important tropical forests in Northern, Central, and Southern Sumatra, including priority areas such as Batang Gadis National Park, Bukit Tigapuluh National Park, Way Kambas National Park, and Siberut Island, famous for its uniqueness and extremely rich biodiversity.

Sumatra holds 210 mammal species and 582 bird species, many of which are rare or endangered, and at least 688 plant species, including the world’s tallest flower. These forests are home to numerous species found only in Indonesia. The United States is proud to work with its partner Indonesia to help that nation preserve its irreplaceable treasure of biodiversity.

http://www.voanews.com/uspolicy/2009-07-27-voa4.cfm

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2009) — Movement through a complex meshwork of small branches at the heights of tropical forests presents a unique challenge to animals wanting to forage for food safely. It can be particularly dangerous for large animals where a fall of up to 30m could be fatal. Scientists found that dangerous tree vibrations can be countered by the orangutan’s ability to move with an irregular rhythm.

Professor Robin Crompton, from the University of Liverpool’s School of Biomedical Sciences, explained that these challenges were similar to the difficulties engineers encountered with London’s ‘wobbly’ Millennium Bridge: “The problems with the Millennium Bridge were caused by large numbers of people walking in sync with the slight sideways motion of the bridge. This regular pattern of movement made the swaying motion of the bridge even worse. We see a similar problem in the movement of animals through the canopy of tropical forests, where there are highly flexible branches.

“Most animals, such as the chimpanzee, respond to these challenges by flexing their limbs to bring their body closer to the branch. Orangutans, however, are the largest arboreal mammal and so they are likely to face more severe difficulties due to weight. If they move in a regular fashion, like their smaller relatives, we get a ‘wobbly bridge’ situation, whereby the movement of the branches increases.”

Dr Susannah Thorpe, from the University of Birmingham’s School of Biosciences, added: “Orangutans have developed a unique way of coping with these problems; they move in an irregular way which includes upright walking, four-limbed suspension from branches and tree-swaying, whereby they move branches backwards and forwards, with increasing magnitude, until they are able to cross large gaps between trees.”

The team studied orangutans in Sumatra, where the animal is predicted to be the first great ape to become extinct. This new research could further understanding into the way orangutans use their habitat, which could support new conservation programmes.

Dr Thorpe continued: “If the destruction of forest land does not slow down, the Sumatran orangutan could be extinct within the next decade. Now that we know more about how they move through the trees and the unique way that they adapt to challenges in their environment we can better understand their needs. This could help with reintroducing rescued animals to the forests and efforts to conserve their environment.”

The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: Science Daily

By David Loughrey on Tue, 28 Jul 2009

Every now and then, the planets of television, topicality and newsworthiness align, and programming coughs up a show that seizes the zeitgeist in a most timely way.

That alignment takes place on August 25, when NHNZ Dunedin producer Judith Curran’s Orangutan Island takes us to ground zero of the palm oil debate that has erupted with Cadbury deciding to reduce the amount of cocoa solids in its milk chocolate and add palm oil instead.

Ms Curran and supporters protested the decision, and the background to her opposition is neatly explained in the new season of Orangutan Island (Animal Planet, August 25, 9.30pm).

The show follows the story of young animals at the Nyaru Menteng rescue and rehabilitation centre, and the juxtaposition of images of uber-cute orangutans being pushed around in a wheelbarrow with those of their forest home denuded of its flora for palm trees gives the issue strong visual resonance.

On top of that, the award-winning Orangutan Island is quite clearly the best example of its genre – ever.

While any hint of earnestness is a drunken lurch for New Zealand’s only television column with a deep commitment to nihilism, Ms Curran’s argument is compelling.

“I have seen from the ground and from the air pristine rainforest give way to massive swathes of cleared land as far as the eye can see.

“I’ve seen it at every stage of destruction, the trees felled, the logs sold and the land burned, and then neatly planted with oil palm trees for millions upon millions of hectares.

“I’ve also seen what happens to the land in Borneo after several crops of palm oil.

“It turns to sand and becomes a desert without its protective rainforest canopy.

“I’ve also seen first hand the results of this devastation to the animal population.

“Seven hundred [and growing] baby orangutans live together in the largest primate rescue centre in the world at Nyaru Menteng in Indonesian Borneo.

“Every single one of them has been orphaned and/or suffered heinous injuries as result of losing their rainforest home to the plantations.

“They are considered pests by the plantation managers and their mothers are killed, hacked apart with machetes, burned [often alive] and shot.

“The babies often escape death at this stage because they are valuable and are sold as pets on the illegal black market.”

To Cadbury, her message is clear.

“I ask Cadburys to reassure their customers that they have looked into this and provide evidence that they are sourcing their palm oil from the estimated 1% that truly does come from purely agricultural and not de-forested land.

“If Cadburys can provide this evidence, they will be congratulated and will easily regain their status as New Zealand and Australia’s most trusted brand.”

Source: http://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/television/67093/chocolate-palm-oil-and-orangutans