Photograph by L.X. Gollin
After the positive news reported here, this story in the NY Times feels like a punch in the gut:
For as long as anyone can remember, Anyie Apoui and his people have lived among the majestic trees and churning rivers in an untouched corner of Borneo, catching fish and wild game, cultivating rice and making do without roads. But all that is about to change.
The Indonesian government has signed a deal with China that will level much of the remaining tropical forests in an area so vital it is sometimes called the lungs of Southeast Asia.
For China, the deal is a double bounty: the wood from the forest will provide flooring and furniture for its ever-expanding middle class, and in its place will grow vast plantations for palm oil, an increasingly popular ingredient in detergents, soaps and lipstick.
The forest-to-palm-oil deal, one of an array of projects that China said it would develop in Indonesia as part of a $7 billion investment spree last year, illustrates the increasingly symbiotic relationship between China’s need for a wide variety of raw materials, and its Asian neighbors’ readiness to provide them, often at enormous environmental cost.
Since this article has disappeared behind the NYT’s subscription wall, I’ll quote at length…
From Indonesia to Malaysia to Myanmar, many of the once plentiful forests of Southeast Asia are already gone, stripped legally or illegally, including in the low-lying lands here in Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo. Only about half of Borneo’s original forests remain.
Those forests that do remain, like the magnificent stands here in Mr. Anyie’s part of the highlands, are ever pressed, ever prized and ever more valuable, particularly as China’s economy continues its surge.
Over all, Indonesia says it expects China to invest $30 billion in the next decade, a big infusion of capital that contrasts with the declining investment by American companies here and in the region.
Much of that Chinese investment is aimed at the extractive industries and infrastructure like refineries, railroads and toll roads to help speed the flow of Indonesia’s plentiful coal, oil, gas, timber and palm oil to China’s ports.
In one of the latest deals, on April 19, Indonesia announced that China had placed a $1 billion rush order for a million cubic yards of a prized reddish-brown hardwood, called merbau, to be used in construction of its sports facilities for the 2008 Olympic Games.
Merbau wood, mostly prevalent in Papua’s virgin forests, has been illegally logged and shipped to China since the late 1990’s, stripping large swathes of forest in the Indonesian province on the western side of the island of New Guinea.
The decision to award a $1 billion concession to China will “increase the deforestation of Papua,” a place of extraordinary biodiversity, said Elfian Effendy, executive director of Greenomics, an Indonesian environmental watchdog. “It’s not sustainable.”
The plan for palm oil plantations on Borneo was signed during a visit by the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to Beijing last July.
Under pressure from environmental groups, the Indonesian environment and forestry ministries have come out against the plan. The coordinating minister for economic affairs, who goes by the single name Boediono, said in April that he was still weighing the pros and cons of executing the entire plan…
…Indonesia’s environmentalists, and some economists, say chopping down as much as 4.4 million acres of the last straight-stemmed, slow-growing towering dipterocarp trees on Borneo would gravely threaten this region’s rare ecosystem for plants, animals and people.
Maps for the project have aroused fears that it would encroach into the forest in Kayan Mentarang National Park, where the intoxicating mix of high altitude and equatorial humidity breeds an exceptional diversity of species, second only to Papua’s, biologists say.
The area is the source of 14 of the 20 major rivers on Borneo, and the destruction of the forests would threaten water supplies to coastal towns, said Stuart Chapman, a director at the World Wildlife Fund in Indonesia…
…A three-day stay at a research station deep inside the forest told what is at stake for the ecosystem, first documented by Charles Darwin’s colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, in an account in the late 1850’s called “The Malay Archipelago.”
Wild mango trees, tropical oaks, pale-trunked myrtles, sago palms, rattan trees and pandanas with shiny leaves like long prongs crowded the hills that rise almost vertically above the river.
Exceedingly tall and elegant dipterocarps towered over all, their green canopies filtering shards of occasional sunlight. Underfoot, tiny dew-encrusted green mosses, still damp in the afternoon, clung to rocks, and miniature versions of African violets poked their mauve flowers just above the ground.
Wildlife abounds, said Stephan Wulffraat, 39, a Dutch conservation biologist and the director of the research station run by the World Wildlife Fund. The forest is home to seven species of leaf monkeys, he said, and at high noon, a crashing sound high in the trees announced a group’s arrival. A red-coated deer made a fleeting appearance and dashed off.
On the gloomy forest floor, Mr. Wulffraat, who fends off leeches by tucking his pant legs into knee-length football socks, has set more than a dozen camera traps to photograph wild creatures too shy to appear.
Three years ago, an animal the size of a large cat with a bushy tail with a reddish fur sauntered by the camera. Mr. Wulffraat, a seven-year veteran of the forest, said that the animal resembled a civet, but he added that he and other experts believed that it was an entirely new species.
The discovery of a species of mammal like a civet is unusual, but dozens of new species of trees, mosses and herbs, butterflies, frogs, fresh water prawns and snakes have all been found since the station opened in 1991, he said. “This field station has more frogs and snake species around than in all of Europe,” Mr. Wulffraat said.
I was alerted to this story by a good friend of mine who did her dissertation work in this part of Borneo. She writes:
I talked to Pak (Mr.) Anye, the village spokesman featured in the article, countless times over the course of my stay there. He said to me – I don’t know who to believe any more. Everybody says they are on our side: WWF, miners, loggers, the government. Maybe we should just bring back head hunting and respond to outsider threats that way…
I have to hope it’s not too late to stop this. Certainly Chinese environmentalists understand better than most the impact of these sorts of development projects. Maybe they can lend some support.
Great post, Lisa. I’m reminded of Jared Diamond’s warningsin Collapse that societies fall when they undervalue their resources and then use them all up. Borneo is killing itself with this deal. Tragic.
.
This links to complete NYT article ::
Forests in Southeast Asia Fall to Prosperity’s Ax
Only about half of Borneo's original forests remain."But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
I’m off to China tomorrow so I won’t be able to continue the conversation here. But I wanted to put this up before I left.
Have a safe trip. We look forward to an interesting report when you get back! 🙂
The Indonesian government is criminal in its wholeselling of of its natural resources. Chinese capitalism is adding tremendous strain to the world ecology. Someone let me off of this train wreck.
Capitalism is what needs to be challenged. It is the belief that natural resources, particularly forestry and ocean resources, are there for the taking.
We need to take a radical new look at how resources are parlayed off to the highest bidder.
Yep, the unseen hand of capitalism is not working, despite the assertions of its advocates to the contrary. Resources need to be managed, especially in the current dog-eat-dog environment. People just can’t be trusted to look out for their own best interests.
On the contrary, people do look out for their own best interests. The problem is that those interests are measured in the short-term and are very personal.
Thus, Indonesian Ministers sign contracts because they are bribed huge amounts by foreign business people. Unsustainable logging is legal because it has been approved by the relevant authorities.
The Indonesian army owns and operates many of the illegal extractive industries in Kalimantan. Who’s going to argue with that?
China seems to not change course on much until some kind of horrible destruction has taken place. I will gladly send Sago Palm seeds to them. We love them here in Alabama and have them going wild in Texas now. The forests of Korea were completely devastated after the Korean war. There wasn’t anything left. They are land locked also in Southern Korea and please know that I’m completely serious when I tell you that they dump fill dirt off shore to increase South Korea’s acreage. They also cherish their forests in South Korea while they are completely at home in helping China deforest itself since they are willing to be so stupid right now. As far as South Korea’s forests go though they are treasured, nurtured, preserved because they can remember when they didn’t have any! Oh Yeah…..on most South Korean rooftops you will also see a solar hot water heater and South Korea was the first place I ever saw or bought an “energy saving” light bulb that has just now begun to show up in the United States and costs a damn fortune to buy. They do like to dye the pom poms on their poodles feet lime green or turquoise though, I guess that is how they “get wild” about stuff!
Most of the Korean forests of the past were cut down and taken to Japan. Koreans still remember Japanese occupation, and there is no love lost.
The Planet that sustains us all looks smaller and more fragile every day. At the current rate of increase in population growth, in forty years or so, there will be about 12 Billion people alive on the planet. Given the amount of damage 6 Billion can do, I feel it is unlikely that we will ever get to 12. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in the 1970’s I believe. I might be good summer reading for those who want to brush up, or read it for the first time. As Knoxville Progressive says at the end of his articles/comments, my biosphere is your biosphere.
The Word for World is Forrest
Indonesia has many problems, and the rapid destruction of the environment is one of the biggest. Widespread corruption and the lack of an independent and functioning system of law enforcement certainly don’t help.
While there are environmental laws and environmental agencies, they have no teeth and anyone who breaks the law can find a way out. Selling off millions of slow-growing rainforest trees is no problem for the Forests Minister if you give him enough money. The logging operation to supply the Chinese will probably be legal.
Kalimantan is also dotted with illegal logging and mining operations.
What does an illegal mine conjur up in your mind? A few guys with picks and shovels who run for cover when the police arrive? Well in Kalimantan, some of the illegal mines run by the Indonesian army are operated as world-class open-cut mines, with dragnets and 200-tonne trucks.
Kalimantan is a major component of one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, teeming with yet-to-be-discovered valuable plant and animal resources. It needs to be protected.