JAKARTA (AP): Environmental groups lashed out at a new World Bank report on Indonesia's forests Wednesday, saying it is an endorsement of a government plan to create vast timber plantations that would damage local ecosystems and livelihoods.
But the World Bank said the proposed strategy for the nation's resource-rich tropical forests until 2009 will "contribute to growth, rural livelihoods and environmental protection."
A sustainable logging industry, the World Bank said, will create jobs and reduce logging of endangered forest.
Indonesia's tropical forest reserves are the world's largest after the Amazon and the Congo basin, but the sprawling archaeologic nation has lost around 40 percent of its canopy to loggers in the last 50 years.
At the present rate of deforestation - with an area roughly the size of El Salvador being cleared annually - lowland trees on Sumatra island and neighboring Borneo will disappear by 2010, conservationists say.
Indonesia asked the World Bank to help devise a forestry plan and in June 2006 it released a 44-page outline. Wednesday's paper was a supplement to that strategy.
Activists with Friends of the Earth International,Environmental Defense and Indonesia's WALHI accused the global lender of prioritizing a government goal to create 5 million hectares of industrial timberplantation.
The giant plantations on Indonesia's Sumatra and Borneo islands would deny small farmers access to land, pollute the soil with chemicals and turn the ecosystem into a monoculture for timber production, said Fara Sofa of WALHI.
"It changes the livelihood of the community and turns them from land owners to paid laborers," she said, adding they would worsen communal conflicts over land rights.
World Bank representatives were not available to comment to the specific allegations, but in the statement said "the report focuses on land and people, not forests and trees" and will improve forest management and biodiversity.
No comments:
Post a Comment