In only a
few years, logging and agribusiness have cut Indonesia's vast rainforest by
half. The government has renewed a moratorium on deforestation but it may
already be too late for the endangered animals –and for the people whose lives
lie in ruin
The Guardian, John Vidal, The Observer, Sunday 26 May 2013
Our small
plane had been flying low over Sumatra for three hours but all we had seen was
an industrial landscape of palm and acacia trees stretching 30 miles in every
direction. A haze of blue smoke from newly cleared land drifted eastward over
giant plantations. Long drainage canals dug through equatorial swamps dissected
the land. The only sign of life was excavators loading trees onto barges to
take to pulp mills.
The end is
in sight for the great forests of Sumatra and Borneo and the animals and people
who depend on them. Thirty years ago the world's third- and sixth-largest
islands were full of tigers, elephants, rhinos, orangutan and exotic birds and
plants but in a frenzy of development they have been trashed in a single
generation by global agribusiness and pulp and paper industries.
Their
plantations supply Britain and the world with toilet paper, biofuels and
vegetable oil to make everyday foods such as margarine, cream cheese and
chocolate, but distraught scientists and environmental groups this week warn
that one of the 21st century's greatest ecological disasters is rapidly
unfolding.
Official
figures show more than half of Indonesia's rainforest, the third-largest swath
in the world, has been felled in a few years and permission has been granted to
convert up to 70% of what remains into palm or acacia plantations. The
government last week renewed a moratorium on the felling of rainforest, but
nearly a million hectares are still being cut each year and the last pristine
areas, in provinces such as Ache and Papua, are now prime targets for giant
logging, palm and mining companies.
The toll on
wildlife across an area nearly the size of Europe is vast, say scientists who
warn that many of Indonesia's species could be extinct in the wild within 20-30
years. Orangutan numbers are in precipitous decline, only 250-400 tigers remain
and fewer than 100 rhino are left in the forests, said the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Millions of
hectares are nominally protected, but the forest is fragmented, national parks
are surrounded by plantations, illegal loggers work with impunity and
corruption is rife in government. "This is the fastest, most comprehensive
transformation of an entire landscape that has ever taken place anywhere in the
world including the Amazon. If it continues at this rate all that will be left
in 20 years is a few fragmented areas of natural forest surrounded by huge
manmade plantations. There will be increased floods, fires and droughts but no
animals," said Yuyun Indradi, political forest campaigner with Greenpeace
southeast Asia in Jakarta.
Last night
the WWF's chief Asian tiger expert pleaded with the Indonesian government and
the world to stop the growth of palm oil plantations. "Forest conversion
is massive. We urgently need stronger commitment from the government and
massive support from the people. We cannot tolerate any further conversion of
natural forests," said Sunarto Sunarto in Jakarta.
Indonesia's
deforestation has been accompanied by rising violence, say watchdog groups.
Last year, more than 600 major land conflicts were recorded in the palm
plantations. Many turned violent as communities that had lost their traditional
forest fought multinational companies and security forces. More than 5,000
human rights abuses were recorded, with 22 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
"The
legacy of deforestation has been conflict, increased poverty, migration to the
cities and the erosion of habitat for animals. As the forests come down, social
conflicts are exploding everywhere," said Abetnego Tarigan, director of
Walhi, Indonesia's largest environment group.
Scientists
fear that the end of the forest could come quickly. Conflict-wracked Aceh,
which bore the brunt of the tsunami in 2004, will lose more than half its trees
if a new government plan to change the land use is pushed through. A single
Canadian mining company is seeking to exploit 1.77m hectares for mining,
logging and palm plantations.
Large areas
of central Sumatra and Kalimantan are being felled as coal, copper and gold
mining companies move in. Millions of hectares of forest in west Papua are
expected to be converted to palm plantations.
"Papuans,
some of the poorest citizens in Indonesia, are being utterly exploited in
legally questionable oil palm land deals that provide huge financial
opportunities for international investors at the expense of the people and
forests of West Papua," said Jago Wadley, a forest campaigner with the
Environment Investigation Agency.
Despite a
commitment last week from the government to extend a moratorium on deforestation for two years, Indonesia is still cutting down its forests faster
than any other country. Loopholes in the law mean the moratorium only covers
new licences and primary forests, and excludes key peatland areas and existing
concessions which are tiger and elephant habitats. "No one seems able to
stop the destruction," said Greenpeace International's forest spokesman,
Phil Aikman.
The
conflicts often arise when companies are granted dubious logging or plantation
permissions that overlap with community-managed traditional forests and
protected areas such as national parks.
Nine
villages have been in conflict with the giant paper company April, which has
permission to convert, with others, 450,000 hectares of deep peat forests on
the Kampar Peninsula in central Sumatra. Because the area contains as much as
1.5bn tonnes of carbon, it has global importance in the fight against climate
change.
"We
would die for this [forest] if necessary. This is a matter of life and death.
The forest is our life. We depend on it when we want to build our houses or
boats. We protect it. The permits were handed out illegally, but now we have no
option but to work for the companies or hire ourselves out for pitiful
wages," said one village leader from Teluk Meranti who feared to give his
name.
They accuse
corrupt local officials of illegally grabbing their land. April, which strongly
denies involvement in corruption, last week announced plans to work with
London-based Flora and Fauna international to restore 20,000 hectares of
degraded forest land.
Fifty miles
away, near the town of Rengit, villagers watched in horror last year when their
community forest was burned down – they suspect by people in the pay of a large
palm oil company. "Life is terrible now. We are ruined. We used to get
resin, wood, timber, fuel from the forest. Now we have no option but to work
for the palm oil company. The company beat us. The fire was deliberate. This forest
was everything for us. We used it as our supermarket, building store, chemist
shop and fuel supplier for generations of people. Now we must put plastic on
our roofs," said one man from the village of Bayesjaya who also asked not
to be named.
Mursyi Ali
from the village of Kuala Cenaku in the province of Riau, has spent 10 years
fighting oil plantation companies which were awarded a giant concession.
"Maybe 35,000 people have been impacted by their plantations. Everyone is
very upset. People have died in protests. I have not accepted defeat yet. These
conflicts are going on everywhere. Before the companies came we had a lot of
natural resources, like honey, rattan, fish, shrimps and wood," he said.
"We
had all we wanted. That all went when the companies came. Everything that we
depended on went. Deforestaion has led to pollution and health problems. We are
all poorer now. I blame the companies and the government, but most of all the
government," he continued. He pleaded with the company: "Please resolve
this problem and give us back the 4,100 hectares of land. We would die for this
if necessary. This is a life or death," he says.
Greenpeace
and other groups accuse the giant pulp and palm companies of trashing tens of
thousands of hectares of rainforest a year but the companies respond that they
are the forest defenders and without them the ecological devastation would be
worse. "There has been a rampant escalation of the denuding of the
landscape but it is mostly by migrant labour and palm oil growers. Poverty and
illegal logging along with migrant labour have caused the deforestation,"
said April's spokesman, David Goodwin.
"What
April does is not deforestation. In establishing acacia plantations in
already-disturbed forest areas, it is contributing strongly to reforestation.
Last year April planted more than 100 million trees. Deforestation happens
because of highly organised illegal logging, slash-and-burn practices by
migrant labour, unregulated timber operations. There has been a explosion of
palm oil concessions."
The company
would not reveal how much rainforest it and its suppliers fell each year but
internal papers seen by the Observer show that it planned to deforest 60,000
hectares of rainforest in 2012 but postponed this pending the moratorium. It admits
that it has a concession of 20,000 hectares of forest that it has permission to
fell and that it takes up to one third of its timber from "mixed tropical
hardwood" for its giant pulp and paper mill near Penabaru in Riau.
There are
some signs of hope. The heat is now on other large palm oil and paper companies
after Asia Pacific Resources International (APP), one of the world's largest
pulp and paper companies, was persuaded this year by international and local
Indonesian groups to end all rainforest deforestation and to rely solely on its
plantations for its wood.
The
company, which admits to having felled hundreds of thousands of acres of
Sumatran forest in the last 20 years, had been embarrassed and financially hurt
when other global firms including Adidas, Kraft, Mattel, Hasbro, Nestlé,
Carrefour, Staples and Unilever dropped products made by APP that had been made
with rainforest timber.
"We
thought that if we adopted national laws to protect the forest that this would
be enough. But it clearly was not. We realised something was not right and that
we needed a much higher standard. So now we will stop the deforestation,
whatever the cost. We are now convinced that the long term benefits will be
greater," said Aida Greenbury, APP's sustainability director. "Yes.
We got it wrong. We could not have done worse."
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This file aerial photograph taken on June 7, 2012 shows lush
tropical forest in Central Kalimantan (AFP Photo/Romeo Gacad)
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