Wednesday, February 07, 2007

I've covered the plight of Indonesia's orangutans before, but an article at MSNBC.com yesterday indicates the situation is even worse than previously thought.

Without urgent action, 98 percent of remaining forests on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo could be gone by 2022, with serious consequences for local people and wildlife including rhinos, tigers and elephants, the U.N. report said

U.N. Environment Program experts, convening on the fringes of a major environmental meeting in Kenya, called the situation a conservation emergency, blaming a "shadowy network of multinational firms for increasingly targeting Indonesian national parks as one of the few remaining sources of commercial timber supplies."

This comes back to supply and demand (and greed). China, the U.S., and the EU are the three largest markets for Indonesian timber. In order to end this devastation, Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia's environment minister, has appealed "to the conscience of the whole world: do not buy uncertified wood."

He said illegal logging was ravaging 37 of his country's 41 national parks, and now accounted for more than 73 percent of all logging in Indonesia.

"It is not being done by individual impoverished people, but by well-organized elusive commercial networks," said Achim Steiner, head of the UNEP.

These networks hire well-armed mercenary thugs against which under-funded and under-equipped response ranger teams are no match.

While the U.S. has already agreed to a pact ensuring Indonesian imports are all legally acquired, the EU is only just getting started in negotiations, and China has yet to come to the table. But time is of the essence:

The U.N. report, which was compiled using new satellite images and Indonesian government data, said orangutan habitat was being lost 30 percent quicker than was previously feared.

It was estimated in 2002 that there were about 60,000 of the shaggy ginger primates left in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra. Some ecologists say the number has now been halved and others say the species could be extinct in 20 years.

Please, do not buy uncertified wood or palm oil products unsustainably produced in Indonesia. These things are not necessary to us, but that habitat is important to the orangutans and other species, including the local people.

Labels: environment, orangutans, primates, wildlife