Can Heavily Deforested Sebangau National Park Be Saved?

Jakarta Globe, Liberty Jemadu, July 21, 2012

A worker carrying saplings at Sebangau National Park. Less than
1 percent of the park’s total area has been reforested. (Antara Photo)

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Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan. Rosdy Abaza is under no illusions about the task before him as the person in charge of restoring the sprawling Sebangau National Park in Central Kalimantan to pristine condition.

“We’re attempting to restore a forest that has been comprehensively destroyed, so you could say this is a mission impossible,” he tells the Jakarta Globe at one of the observation posts scattered across the 568,700-hectare park.

The park, between the Katingan and Kahayan rivers, was only formally established in 2004. Between 1980 and 1995, it was the site of 13 massive logging concessions that left the formerly dense and pristine peat forest stripped bare and dried out.

In the unregulated years between being a logging forest and a national park, the Sebangau area was the target of massive illegal logging that was estimated to have cleared some 66,000 hectares of forest.

Rosdy says the park area previously covered by peat swamp — a meters-deep layer of hundreds of years’ worth of decaying vegetation — makes up 85 percent of the total area, and to restore it back to its pre-logged state would take another several centuries.

One of the first things the loggers did when they came in was to carve out a network of more than 1,000 canals, two to four meters wide, to drain the peat swamp to make it easy to transport the logs downstream. That left the exposed peat layer, in some places up to 12 meters deep, highly vulnerable to forest fires.

Also to blame was the government’s misguided Mega Rice Project of 1996, a scheme to clear-cut the centuries-old peat forests in Kalimantan, drain the soil and set up a million hectares of rice paddies.

Part of the land for the MRP was a wide swath between the Sebangau and Kahayan rivers. When the MRP was abandoned, there was no attempt to restore the peat forest and the affected area on the eastern third of the Sebangau National Park remains severely degraded.

The key to restoring the condition of the peat forest is to get the water back into the ground, which Rosdy acknowledges is a daunting task.

The park management’s two main conservation programs deal with blocking the former logging canals and reforesting the denuded land. The success of the latter is contingent on that of the former, but the canal-blocking program has stumbled on funding issues.

Of the 428 dams built since the start of 2011 to block up the canals, only one was funded by the park. The rest were funded by the World Wide Fund for Nature.

“Ideally we should be building 100 dams a year,” Rosdy says, adding that the cost for each dam is about Rp 80 million ($8,500).

Like the canal-blocking program, the reforestation program has also been slow to take off.

Just 4,868 hectares — less than 1 percent of Sebangau’s total area — have been reforested. Of that figure, less than half was funded by the state, with the rest coming from conservation groups and corporate social responsibility programs.

But against the overwhelming odds, Rosdy says there is reason to be hopeful about the future of the park.

Thanks to the damming program, the water level in the peat layer in some areas has begun rising since 2005, leading to the return of native tree species, including the critically endangered red balau, the hardwood jelutong and the softwood pulai.

The recovering water levels have also meant less frequent forest fires. “We haven’t had any major forest fires in this area since 2009,” Rosdy says.

As the forest slowly recovers, there is also hope for the survival of the various wildlife species native to the area. These include Bornean orangutans, proboscis monkeys and Bornean gibbons, all of which are endangered species.

Sebangau is home to an estimated 6,000 orangutans, the largest wild population of the ape anywhere in the world.

Top Palm Oil Producer Indonesia Wants to Be More Refined

Jakarta Globe, Michael Taylor, Niluksi Koswanage & Chew Yee Kiat, July 16, 2012

A worker carries palm fruits at a palm oil plantation in Talun Kenas, North
 Sumatra. Indonesia is the world's largest producer of palm oil, with 25.4 million
 tons produced in 2011, followed by Malaysia with 18.7 million tons. The two
 countries account for 80 percent of global output, and are followed by Thailand.
(EPA Photo/Dedi Sahputra)

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Jakarta/Kuala Lumpur. For decades, Indonesia has shipped out tanker loads of raw palm oil for processing into higher value cooking oil and margarine in Rotterdam, Mumbai and Kuala Lumpur.

Now, the world’s No. 1 producer of the edible oil is seeing a more than $2.5 billion wave of investment to build a refining industry that will double its capacity and mean it could supply the entire needs of Asia’s top food consumers — India and China.

The transformation — driven by Indonesia’s move to slash export duties for processed oil last October — will heat up competition with rivals such as Malaysia and send ripples through the palm oil market as new supply pressures prices of traded refined products such as palm olein, used as cooking oil.

A Reuters survey of 30 firms operating in Indonesia — from the world’s biggest listed palm oil firm Wilmar to conglomerate Unilever — shows plans to nearly double refining capacity to 43 million tonnes of palm oil, or 80 percent of total world output.  

“The government is sending a clear message — to survive, you need a refinery. So the palm oil firms are putting their money out and following the big guys in the industry who have already done so,” said Thomas Mielke, an analyst at industry publication Oil World.

“There is the threat of over capacity. But palm oil firms with the whole supply chain behind them, we are talking about having plantations to mills and ports, will be the kings.”    

Gleaming silver storage tanks standing ten-storeys’ high are becoming a feature of Indonesia’s landscape as more refineries spring up, threatening the stranglehold on processing held by neighboring Malaysia, the No.2 palm oil producer.

At a newly built refinery near Jakarta, staff wearing face masks and hair caps work on conveyor belts carrying boxes of margarine and cooking oil.  

The $249-million Marunda plant run by PT SMART was launched before the tax change and Indonesia’s top palm oil firm plans to spend a further $200 million on new refining capacity despite the infrastructure issues it faced building Marunda.

PT SMART will be one of the biggest investors in the sector along with Wilmar and unlisted Musim Mas, which plans to spend $860 million, according to the survey.

Government officials in Malaysia and Indonesia say these firms had aggressively lobbied Jakarta to cut duties on refined palm oil to half those levied on crude.

Much of the expansion is led by companies owned by powerful tycoons in Indonesia. SMART is controlled by the family of Eka Tjipta Widjaja, who created a palm oil empire from his humble start selling biscuits from a rickshaw.

Foreign firms are not far behind. Commodities trader Louis Dreyfus formed joint ventures with planters such as Singapore-listed Kencana Agri to build refineries in Indonesia.

Until now, Indonesia had focused on expanding plantations.

Oil palms cover roughly 8.2 million hectares (20.3 million acres), an area about the size of the island of Ireland, and their cultivation is often blamed for rainforest destruction.

Bring Down Prices

Palm oil, the world’s most traded and consumed edible oil, is used mainly as an ingredient in food such as biscuits and ice cream, or as a biofuel.

For decades, refined palm olein POL-MYRBD-M1 enjoyed premiums of 5-10 percent over crude palm oil futures.

But with more Indonesian supplies coming on stream, more inefficient refining operations could get shut.

On the flip side, greater competition could cut final product costs to the benefit of consumers in India and China, where food inflation is a constant concern for policy makers. So far this year, palm olein prices have fallen nearly 10 percent on higher Indonesian supplies.  

Under its refining plans, Indonesia could meet domestic needs of around 10 million tonnes annually as well as supplying the combined 20 million tonnes of edible oil imports required by top buyers China and India.

Indonesia’s crude palm oil output — estimated at 23 to 25 million tonnes in 2012 — looks set to be outpaced by the planned increase in refining capacity in the next two years.

That means some palm oil firms may build refineries run at lower capacities until more edible oil supply comes in.

DBS analyst Ben Santoso said latecomers to Indonesia’s refining business could see margins squeezed to $40 per tonne from $70, although still healthier than its main competitor.

“The capacity of some of these smaller companies will turn idle. But let’s not forget, Malaysia’s refining margin is just $9 to $10 a tonne,” he added.

Malaysia and India Feel the Pressure

As Indonesia rushes to build refineries, vegetable oil refiners in Malaysia and India are feeling the pressure.

“I am having sleepless nights. I have closed down 30-40 percent of my factory and I hope it won’t be more,” said a refiner in Malaysia’s Johor state.

Malaysia currently has 22.9 million tonnes of refining capacity, with only about three quarters of it used last year down from a record 90 percent in 2005.

And this shows in exports. Malaysia’s combined refined palm olein exports in April and May dropped 19 percent to about 1 million tonnes from a year ago, according to cargo surveyors.

Indonesian palm olein shipments jumped 55 percent in the same period to nearly 600,000 tonnes.

Malaysia could respond by removing a tax free export quota for crude palm used to feed the overseas factories of some firms or

replicate Indonesia’s tax system to level the playing field.

Both options are politically risky with an election on the horizon, as they entail taxing crude palm oil that in Malaysia is mostly produced by small farmers who make up the bulk of the electorate and come under the tax free export quota.

To capitalize on Indonesia’s export tax changes, Malaysia’s top planter Sime Darby is building an Indonesian refinery. KL Kepong and IOI Corp are expected to follow suit.

India, the world’s largest edible oil buyer, has been fending off industry calls to hike the import duty on refined palm oil to stem the inflow of cheap cargoes from Indonesia for fear of stoking inflation.

India currently imposes a 7.5 percent tax on refined palm oil from Indonesia. But it is still $15 cheaper a tonne to import Indonesia’s processed palm oil than to ship in crude and refine it, traders say.

“Before Indonesia changed the export taxes, a lot of refiners were expanding their factories,” said Ashok Sethia, president of the Solvent Extractors Association of India.

“Now all those plans have been abandoned,” he added.

Refined palm olein used to make up below 5 percent of total imports and now accounts for nearly 20 percent of 883,410 tonnes shipped into India in May.  

This will make it hard for India to preserve its processing capacity of 15 million tonnes.

Sensitive Policy

Palm oil is just part of Indonesia’s efforts to attract investment and squeeze more from its agricultural and mineral resources, a policy that has sometimes backfired.

In May, Indonesia imposed a 20 percent tax on some metal ore exports and told miners to submit plans to build smelters or process ore domestically. The government says this should help Indonesia earn more revenue, although a union said miners had laid off more than 200,000 workers since the ruling.

Taxes on palm oil were introduced in 1994 with the aim of ensuring palm-based cooking oil was available in the developing country of more than 200 million people.

But the system fell apart when the rupiah currency collapsed during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, prompting palm oil firms to export more and triggering food riots at home.

With this in mind, export taxes on crude palm oil were kept much lower than on refined oil to shore up domestic supply. That frustrated the processing industry with many firms thinking of exiting Indonesia in 2010 and 2011, said Sahat Sinaga, executive director of the Indonesian Vegetable Oil Refiners Association.

“If the government did not take action, we would have just remained a crude palm oil exporter and earned much less,” said Sinaga.”

Reuters

Indonesian zoo aims to stub out orangutan's smoking habit

Zookeepers hope that 15-year-old Tori will finally beat decade-long addiction when she is moved out of visitors' reach

guardian.co.uk, Kate Hodal in Bangkok, Thursday 5 July 2012

Tori the orangutan learned to smoke at Taru Jurug zoo by imitating visitors.
Photograph: Centre for Orangutan Protection, Borneo, Indonesia

Zookeepers in Indonesia have been forced to move an orangutan out of visitors' reach after the 15-year-old primate developed a serious smoking habit.

Tori learned to smoke 10 years ago by imitating zoo visitors, who would throw their cigarette butts into her open cage. She has been smoking ever since, according to activists. They say that she holds up two fingers to her mouth to insinuate she wants a smoke, and becomes angry and throws things if none are readily available.

Zookeepers at Taru Jurug zoo in Solo have unsuccessfully tried luring the ape away with food and extinguishing the butts with water. Now the zoo – with help from the Borneo-based Centre for Orangutan Protection (COP) – plans to move Tori and her partner on to a small island in the zoo's lake by August. They hope the large trees, rope swings and views over the zoo will make Tori forget about her nicotine fix. Until then, the centre has sent extra volunteers to guard the cage and will install mesh netting to prevent visitors from throwing in their butts.

Tori may be Indonesia's most famous smoking orangutan, but she is not the only one. Tori's parents were also smokers and many more of Indonesia's zoo-based orangutans are thought to be hooked on the habit, says Hardi Baktiantoro of COP. The creatures' 97% genetic similarity to humans means that they will often mimic and take on behaviours similar to ours – sometimes to their detriment.

"It is very common in Indonesian zoos for people to throw cigarettes or food [at animals] even though there are signs to not feed or give cigarettes," says Baktiantoro. "It happens all the time. [In Tori's case], people will throw cigarettes in, watch her smoke, start laughing and take pictures."

So far, Tori's partner Didik – who is new to the zoo – has not yet taken up smoking, preferring instead to stamp out butts whenever they are thrown into the cage that he and Tori share. But activists worry that he could soon succumb to the habit, as nearly 70% of Indonesian men over the age of 20 are smokers, and zookeepers have had difficulty educating and preventing visitors from doing what they will.

Indonesia's zoos have come under fire for their appalling conditions – where visitors, not just zookeepers, are sometimes to blame. It was reported two years ago that, at Surabaya zoo in East Java, about 25 of its 4,000 animals were dying prematurely every month. This included a Sumatran tiger and an African lion.

In March this year, a 30-year-old giraffe was found dead at the zoo with an 18kg (39.7lb) ball of plastic in its stomach, after years of eating litter thrown into its pen by visitors.

Endangered Sumatran rhinoceros born in captivity

BBC News, 23 June 2012 

Ratu's pregnancy lasted about
16 months

A Sumatran rhinoceros - one of the world's most endangered species - has given birth at a sanctuary in Indonesia.

Conservationists at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas National Park said the mother, Ratu, and her male calf were both "very well".

It is only the fourth recorded case of a Sumatran rhino being born in captivity in a century.

There are thought to be fewer than 200 alive in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Their numbers have dropped by 50% over the past 20 years, largely due to poaching and loss of habitat.

'Big present'

A spokesman for Indonesia's forest ministry, Masyhud, told the AFP news agency that Ratu's labour had gone "smoothly and naturally".

"It's really a big present for the Sumatran rhino breeding efforts as we know that this is a very rare species which have some difficulties in their reproduction," he added.

"This is the first birth of a Sumatran rhino at a sanctuary in Indonesia."

It was Ratu's third pregnancy. The previous two ended in miscarriages.

The father of the baby rhino, Andalas, was born at Cincinnati Zoo in the US in 2001 - the first Sumatran rhino to be delivered in captivity in 112 years.

He was brought to Indonesia in 2009 to mate with Ratu, who was born in the wild but wandered out of a forest and was taken in by the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary.

On Friday, the US-based International Rhino Foundation said that a veterinary team would harvest Ratu's placental cells, which could be used to generate stem cells.

Stem cells had the potential to be useful for many purposes in the near future, including curing diseases and helping promote reproduction, it said.

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Brazil biofuel: Shell axes plan for 'illegal' sugar cane

BBC News, 13 June 2012

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Guarani tribes in western Brazil complain
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farmers

A biofuels company set up in Brazil by oil giant Shell has signed a landmark agreement giving up plans to buy sugar cane grown on indigenous lands.

The company, Raizen, was sourcing some of the raw material for ethanol from farmers who encroached on the lands of the Guarani tribe in Mato Grosso state.

The deal comes after months of pressure by the Brazilian authorities and indigenous tribes.

The leader of the Guarani tribe, Nisio Gomes, was shot dead last year.

Gomes, 59, was killed in front of his community in the town of Amambai, near Paraguay border.

Indigenous leaders and pressure group Survival International have welcomed the agreement signed by Raizen, but warned that the tribe's future continued to be threatened by illegal logging and farming on their ancestral lands.

Valdelice Veron, an indigenous Guarani in Mato Grosso do Sul state, says their rivers have been polluted by pesticides.

"We will be able to drink water from our land again. We will be able to start afresh," she told Survival International.

Booming demand

Raizen was established in 2010 as a multi-billion joint venture of Shell and Brazilian ethanol company Cosan to produce ethanol from sugar cane.

The company says it produces 2.2 billion litres of ethanol every year, for export and to supply the Brazilian market, where most a great deal of the cars run both on petrol and biofuel.

Shell's move came under renewed pressure after the killing of Nisio Gomes.

In the deal signed with Brazilian indigenous agency Funai, Raizen says it will not source sugar cane from any land declared by the Ministry of Justice as belonging to indigenous tribes.

The agreement comes into force in November.

The Guarani are Brazil's largest indigenous minority, with around 46,000 members living in seven states.

Many others live in neighbouring Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.

The group suffers from a severe shortage of land in Brazil, which has worsened as a boom in agriculture has led farmers and ranchers to extend their holdings.

Indigenous activists say farmers in Mato Grosso do Sul frequently use violence and threats to force them off their ancestral territory, and that the local authorities do little to protect them.

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Bamboo points way to green construction in Indonesia's Bali

AsiaOne, AFP, Sunday, Jun 10, 2012

SIBANG KAJA, Indonesia - Strong, light and cheaper than steel poles, bamboo is ubiquitous across Asia as scaffolding.

So much so that in recognition of the material's versatility, the Indonesian island of Bali has made it an emblem of sustainable construction, replacing buildings of concrete and steel with far greener alternatives.

An entire school, luxury villas and even a chocolate factory are the latest structures to rise from bamboo skeletons as the plant's green credentials and strength are hailed.

A general view a a roof of a chocolate
 factory constructed from bamboo
at a village in Sibang, Badung regency
 on Bali island in this photograph taken
on June 4, 2012. (AFP Photo/Sonny 
Tumbelaka)

The factory, which opened last year and produces organic drinking chocolate and cocoa butter, is the latest in a string of buildings on the island, including homes and businesses, to be built of bamboo.

Erected in the village of Sibang Kaja between the resort island's smoggy capital Denpasar and the forests of Ubud, the factory is the initiative of specialty food firm Big Tree Farms, which claims the 2,550-square-metre (27,500-square-foot) facility is the biggest commercial bamboo building in the world.

"Bamboo is unmatched as a sustainable building material. What it can do is remarkable," Big Tree Farms co-founder Ben Ripple, 37, told AFP.

"It grows far more quickly than timber and doesn't destroy the land it's grown on," said Ripple, an American from Connecticut. "Our factory can be packed up and moved in days, so if we decided to shut it down one day, we're not going to damage the rice paddies we sit on."

The 100 hectares (247 acres) of paddies sit inside a so-called "bamboo triangle," with the factory, school and villas standing at each of the three points.

Such ambitious bamboo projects in Bali are mostly driven by eco-conscious foreigners.

With studies showing construction to be one of the world's least sustainable industries - eating up around half of the globe's non-renewable resources - sustainable construction is slowly taking root around the world.

It is among the key topics for discussion at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which opens June 20 in Rio de Janeiro.

In Sibang, the tawny brown bamboo buildings with their grass thatched roofs appear to be rising from the earth.

The three-storey chocolate factory is pieced together using a complex system of scissor trusses and bolts, thanks to clever architecture.

It resembles the traditional longhouses found on Borneo island and was made with more than 18,000 metres (59,000 feet) of bamboo from Bali and Java.

At Sibang's nearby Green School, the 240 students - most of them children of expatriates - learn in semi-outdoor classrooms decked with bamboo furniture.

The school, which opened in 2008 and was the magnet for the other two projects, has 25 bamboo buildings, the main one being a stilt-structure constructed with 2,500 bamboo poles, or culms.

"In Hong Kong and China, they make new skyscrapers of concrete and glass using bamboo scaffolding. But here, the workmen stood on steel scaffolding to build this bamboo building. That's always seemed funny to me," said Green School admissions head Ben Macrory, from New York.

"In most parts of Asia, bamboo is seen as the poor man's timber."

Not, however, in Sibang, where the bamboo villas that nestle between the palm trees are worth US$350,000 to US$700,000 (S$450,000 to S$899,000) each.

Like decadent treehouses for adults, they have semi-outdoor areas and include innovative bamboo flooring that resembles smooth timber and jellybean-shaped coffee tables made from thin bamboo slats.

Bamboo - technically a grass - has been used in building for centuries because of its impressive strength-to-weight ratio.

Jules Janssen, an authority on bamboo in the Netherlands, says that the weight of a 5,000-kilogram (11,000-pound) elephant can be supported by a short bamboo stub with a surface area of just 10 square centimetres (1.5 square inches).

One reason bamboo is so environmentally-friendly is the speed at which it grows, according to Terry Sunderland, a scientist at the Centre for International Forestry Research in Indonesia.

"In China, eucalyptus can grow at three to four metres (10-13 feet) a year, which is very impressive for timber. But building-quality bamboo will grow between six and 10 metres (20-33 feet) in that time," he said.

And unlike trees that rarely grow back once felled, bamboo will continue to produce new shoots even after cutting.

But even bamboo has its drawbacks.

Without intensive treatment, it is prone to rotting after exposure to water. It also catches fire relatively easily, which is why many countries limit bamboo structures to just a few storeys.

Ripple acknowledged that building with bamboo was not foolproof, but expressed optimism that the technology to protect it from the elements will improve.

"A friend we work with here always says bamboo needs a hat, rain jacket and boots," he said. "We're lacking on the rain jacket a bit, but we're looking at non-toxic materials to give it some protection."

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Yudhoyono Gets Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior Invite

Jakarta Globe, June 07, 2012

Greenpeace's new Rainbow Warrior will be christened at a sustainable
development summit in Rio de Janeiro. (Photo from greenpeace.org)

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Greenpeace has invited President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to board its new Rainbow Warrior ship at the upcoming UN environmental meeting in Rio de Janeiro.

At the presidential office in Jakarta on Thursday, Yudhoyono met with executives from the international environmental advocacy group, including Greenpeace International executive director Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace Asia executive director Von Hernandez and Nur Hidayati, head of the Greenpeace Indonesia office.

Naidoo told a press conference after the meeting that the invitation was in light of the upcoming UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio De Janeiro from June 20-22.

Despite Greenpeace’s often critical stance on the Indonesian government’s environmental record, including a one-year-old deforestation moratorium that critics have lambasted as poorly enforced, Naidoo praised the nation on Thursday for its “commitment” to environmental issues.

“Indonesia has shown its commitment not only to environmental issues but also to encouraging synergy between the economic and environmental sectors and poverty reduction,” Naidoo said.

“The results of my discussion with the president show that economic growth, environmental protection and poverty reduction can go together,” he added.

Naidoo further said Greenpeace had extended an invitation to Yudhoyono to board its new Rainbow Warrior ship, which will be christened on the sidelines of the Rio summit.

He added that the third Rainbow Warrior was scheduled to visit Indonesia next year. The first Rainbow Warrior was bombed in 1985, while the second was retired in August of last year.

Naidoo did not say, however, whether Yudhoyono accepted the invitation.

Antara/JG

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Brazil farmers in legal feud with Monsanto over GM soy

Google/AFP, by Hector Velasco (AFP), May 3, 2012

Combine harvesters crop a soybean field in Campo Novo do Parecis

(AFP/File, Yasuyoshi Chiba)

CAMPO NOVO DE PARECIS, Brazil — Illegally smuggled into Brazil 14 years ago, transgenic soy has proved a boon to domestic farmers and now accounts for 85 percent of total production.

But five million Brazilian farmers are now locked in a legal feud with US biotech giant Monsanto, the GM soy seed manufacturer, and are refusing to pay crop royalties.

In the mid-1990s Monsanto began commercializing its genetically modified soy in the United States.

Monsanto's soy seeds are spliced with a bacterium's gene that makes the plants immune to the company's popular herbicide Roundup, which farmers can then use to kill weeds while the soy plants flourish.

The first transgenic soy seeds were illegally smuggled into Brazil from neighboring Argentina in 1998 and their use was banned and subject to prosecution until the last decade, according to the state-owned Brazilian Enterprise for Agricultural Research (EMBRAPA).

The ban has since been lifted and now 85 percent of the country's soybean crop (25 million hectares or 62 million acres) is genetically modified, according to Alexandre Cattelan, an EMBRAPA researcher.

Last year, Brazil was the world's second producer and exporter of soybean, behind the United States.

Sales of GM soy -- which is used for animal feed, soybean oil or biofuel -- reached a whopping $24.1 billion and made up 26 percent of Brazil's farm exports last year. China is the main customer of Brazilian soy.

But four years ago, five million big and small Brazilian producers filed a lawsuit against Monsanto, accusing the US chemical giant of unduly collecting two percent of sales of their annual harvest.

Since 2003-2004, Monsanto has demanded that producers of transgenic soy pay it two percent of their sales as crop royalties, Neri Perin, a representative of big producers, told AFP.

Lawyers for the producers say this means that their clients end up paying twice for the seed.

"Monsanto gets paid when it sell the seeds. The law gives producers the right to multiply the seeds they buy and nowhere in the world is there a requirement to pay (again). Producers are in effect paying a private tax on production," said lawyer Jane Berwanger.

In April, a judge in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, Giovanni Conti, ruled in favor of the producers and ordered Monsanto to return royalties paid since 2004 or a minimum of $2 billion.

Monsanto appealed and a federal court is to rule on the case by 2014.

In the meantime, the US company said it was still being paid crop royalties.

At the same time, transgenic soy cultivation is spreading like wildfire across Brazil, despite protests from environmentalists who say it leads to increased deforestation and from experts who say it results in less farm jobs.

"Transgenic soy occupies 44 percent of land under grain cultivation but represents only 5.5 percent of farm jobs," said Sergio Schlesinger, a researcher who slammed the advance of soybean monoculture in his book "the grain that grew too much."

He said this highly mechanized monoculture requires little labor and leads to the expulsion of thousands of farm workers.

After its initial ban on GM soy, the Brazilian government is now investing in research to develop this type of technology.

Transgenic soy is now grown in 17 of the country's 26 states, with the largest production in Mato Grosso, Parana and Rio Grande do Sul.

Although still the largest exporting country, the United States has lost the dominant position it once had in the global soy trade. Brazil, Argentina, China and India have all become major players as the world's demand for soy as food, vegetable oil, and animal feed has continued to increase.

Given the amount of available arable land and water resources in Brazil, experts expect this South American giant to eventually become the number one soybean-producing nation.

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How Do You Save Sumatra? Google Map It

Jakarta Globe, Andrew D. Kaspa, June 03, 2012

A map showing Sumatra's forest cover in 1985.
(Photo Courtesy of http://maps.eyesontheforest.or.id)

        

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Sumatra becomes a digital paint-by-number as you play with the layering functions of the “Google Earth: Eyes on the Forest” map. With one click, the world’s sixth-largest island becomes a sea of green rainforest. Another click reveals a decidedly less emerald present-day reality.

Toggling the various data sets can be an enlightening — and for the environmentally conscious, alarming — exercise.

The project, unveiled last week, is a joint venture of Google Earth Outreach, the World Wildlife Fund and Eyes on the Forest, a Sumatra-based coalition of environmental NGOs. It organizes decades of data in a visual array that sheds light on a bedeviling question: Just what’s really out there in Sumatra, and how quickly are the forests being destroyed?

Users can query the Google Maps Engine for an assortment of data on Sumatra, such as what land is ostensibly under government protection, what types of forests exist and once existed, and which land tracts are considered high-priority conservation areas.

In the spotlight are four critically endangered species — the Sumatran rhino, elephant, orangutan and tiger — that are often the “faces” of deforestation on the island. Users can set the map to reveal the shrinking ranges of these animals over the last 25 years.

It becomes clear that Sumatra’s shrinking forests are sending these animals the way of the dodo.

Afdhal Mahyuddin, a spokesman for the coalition, said a synthesis of governmental and NGO data began in the early 2000s. The tool’s creators hope the map can help inform policy debates, raise awareness and maybe, just maybe, slow the rate of deforestation.

“Now is the time to turn these static reports into dynamic, living web-based databases,” Afdhal wrote in an e-mail to the Jakarta Globe. “WWF and EoF focused on Sumatra … as it is the island with the highest deforestation rate in Indonesia and where transparency on the drivers of that deforestation is needed the most.”

The most sobering feature of the new tool is the ability to push “play” on the deforestation that has taken place on the island since 1985, watching the dramatic withering of the island’s forest cover play out on loop. Based on WWF data, the Google Maps Engine shows the incremental loss of just less than 50 percent of natural forest cover since 1985.

Map layers also address the broader issue of deforestation’s contribution to carbon dioxide-induced global warming, which is taking place in rainforests across the world. The depletion of carbon stocks stored up in trees and peatland is a problem not just for Sumatran tigers and rhinos, but for humankind’s posterity as well.

The project is a logical outgrowth of two things: the fact that Indonesia’s rainforests are seeing some of the fastest rates of deforestation on the planet, and Indonesians’ insatiable appetite for all things web-related. Maps may succeed where protests and studies have not.

It is part of a broader suite of Google Earth projects with a philanthropic bent, typically launched in collaboration with NGOs. Recent projects include a map to track land-mine clearing around the world; partnering with an indigenous tribe to protect the Amazon rainforest they call home; and a map revealing the effects of mountaintop mining removal in the United States’ Appalachian Mountains.

The Sumatra team hopes to eventually include other regions and data sets.

“Ultimately, a nationwide civil society-driven ‘Internet map facility’ like this would be very desirable,” Afdhal wrote. “But it would only work and stay current if it is supported by all the stakeholders who have and are collecting detailed knowledge on any given geographical area to be collected by the facility.”

“Further expansion is planned, but will also depend on how fast we can find funding for the work.”

And as they say, money doesn’t grow on trees.

Philippine Hybrid Rice Gains Int’l Acceptance; Indonesia Plants Big Area

MB.com, by Melody Aguiba, June 3, 2012

The locally developed SL-8 hybrid rice has become a popular international rice variety with 32,000 hectares now planted in Indonesia and is expanding rapidly in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa.

Hybrid Rice

A total of 105,000 hectares is aimed to be planted with SL AGritech Corp.’s (SLAC) hybrid rice varieties in Indonesia.

The company’s agreement with the Indonesian government has led to a plan to expand the hybrid area which consists of 40,000 hectares in East Kalimantan, 21,000 hectares in South Kalimantan, 34,000 hectares in South Sulawesi, and 10,000 hectares in Southeast Sulawesi.

SLAC is also shipping this year 1,000 metric tons (MT) of seeds to Bangladesh in an agreement with the government and another 1,000 MT to Vietnam.

"The Philippines is now famous among Bangladesh farmers because Bangladesh traditionally uses Chinese hybrid. But it’s only SL that has become a government-supported hybrid, so they’re always talking about SL-8 as a government hybrid," SLAC President Henry Lim Bon Liong said in a press briefing.

It will beef up seed shipment volume to Myanmar, Brunei, India, and Nigeria.

But the aim of the company is to partner with foreign governments so that the hybrid rice seeds may be grown abroad rather than exported from the Philippines.

"We want to do seed production in their land because we have limited land," said Lim.

In Myanmar, SLAC initially shipped 10 to 11 MT of parental seeds worth $35,000 which has since been showing favorable results.

"During the harvest of the seeds, even the president of Myanmar was there because it their highest yield (so far) in Myanmar," he said.

A yield of up to 17 MT per hectare has already been achieved in the country from these hybrid rice seeds since the government adopted a hybrid rice program 10 years ago.

Among the highest yielders were Severino Payumo, 17.28 MT per hectare in Nueva Ecija; Aida Badong, 17.2 MT, Camarines Sur; Fernando Gabuyo, 16.75 MT, Nueva Ecija; and Eduardo Policarpio, 15.8 MT, Nueva Ecija.

Yield in Bangladesh has been reaching to 12 MT per hectare.

While India is also a hybrid rice seed producing country, SLAC has an opportunity to expand in India, said Lim, while it is likewise expanding in Nigeria.

"Nigeria is a top importer of rice. Before they were the largest importer until we overtook them as the largest rice importer. They’re very sincere in expanding hybrid rice area. That’s why we’ll send technicians over to them, he said.

"Before they used to eat just corn and sorghum. But rice is easy to prepare, is tender, and has the aroma which they got to like so consumption went up. A lot of African countries will eat more rice in the future. The market is going to be bigger and bigger."

Lim said that while the Department of Agriculture aims to export rice, the government may do better by targeting to export high yielding hybrid rice which can make exporting more globally competitive.

"We can never be competitive at the $400 price of rice in the market. The production cost of Vietnam is only P8 per kilo. Maybe our cost of production is P11 cost per kilo."

Harvesting only three to four MT per hectare will not make the country export-competitive, but hybrid rice’s higher yield that can reach 11 to 12 MT per hectare will bring costs down, he said.

3 Sumatran Elephants Found Poisoned in Indonesia

Jakarta Globe, June 02, 2012

An official inspects a dead Sumatran elephant allegedly poisoned by
 poachers for its tusks, in Bireum Bayeun, Aceh province, Indonesia, on Friday,
June 1, 2012. Three Sumatran elephants were found dead from poisoning on
Friday. Indonesia's endangered elephants on Sumatra island are threatened
 by habitat loss and poaching. Less than 3,000 Sumatran elephants are
 believed to remain in the wild. (AP Photo/Iskandar)

An environmentalist says three endangered Sumatran elephants have been poisoned and found dead within a palm oil plantation in western Indonesia.

Rono Wiranata from the FAKTA nongovernment group said workers at the state-run plantation were believed to have placed the poison on palm fruits.

The dead 3- and 5-year-old elephants were found Thursday in two separate locations in East Aceh district.

Wiranata on Friday cited plantation workers in saying more elephants may die from the poison. Five of the endangered Sumatran elephants have been found poisoned in Aceh province since April.

Fewer than 3,000 Sumatran elephants are left in the wild. Environmentalists say they could be extinct within three decades unless they are protected.

Associated Press