Thomas Bell Telegraph 28 Nov 07;
Secret filming by villagers has revealed the damage being caused to the Indonesian rainforests by uncontrolled logging and palm oil plantations.
The destruction of peat bogs in Indonesia, partly to grow supposedly "green" bio-fuels, releases more carbon dioxide every year than all of India or Russia, and three times as much as Germany.
According to recent research by Wetlands International, a conservation group, "the emissions in 1997 alone, which was a particularly bad year, were estimated to have reached 40pc of global CO2 emissions."
When Indonesia hosts a United Nation climate conference in Bali next week to prepare a successor to the Kyoto Treaty, the focus will be on halting the destruction of peat bogs and forests, and on the bio-fuel craze which is driving the problem.
Peat is made up of ancient plant material which never fully decomposed in wet conditions, forming a global carbon bank equivalent to 70 years of emissions at today's rates. But vast tracts of tropical bog on Borneo and the neigbouring island of Sumatra are being cleared, drained and burnt to grow palm oil.
Palm oil prices are at record highs, and future demand seems guaranteed.
European legislation requires that 2pc of all diesel must be biofuels, rising to 5.7pc in 2010 and 10pc by 2020. Elsewhere, governments including America's are promoting bio-fuels.
With so much money involved politicians have latched onto the industry as a source of economic growth and, critics allege, of big kickbacks. Indonesia hopes to add 24 million hectares of palm oil plantations to the six million already developed by 2015.
One of the biggest environmental disasters on Borneo is the Mega-Rice Project, a 3,860 square mile area of former peat bog once covered with tropical forest that was felled and drained for rice cultivation in the mid-1990s.
Where there were forests abundant in orangutans and other wildlife there is now a grid of canals, dusty earth and charred stumps.
Rice never grew here. The government had ignored scientific advice that the crop would fail in acidic soil. Environmentalists want to re-flood to preserve the peat, but the district government has drawn up plans to plant 440 square miles of oil palms here.
The Bali conference may offer a partial solution. Indonesia, and other countries with big tropical forests, are pushing hard for a scheme that would create a market in carbon safely stored in natural banks such as forests and bogs.
Under Kyoto, which expires in 2012, only carbon that has already been emitted by industry can be traded. Economists say the scheme would be a relatively cheap way to reduce global warming, costing the developed world GBP50bn a year to -in theory at least- end the destruction all together.
That would cut global greenhouse emissions by 20pc at a stroke.
"They don't have forests, but we do, so if we all want this one Earth of ours to survive, please share [the burden]", Indonesia's president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said this week.
Scheptics say such a scheme would be hard to design, or to implement in countries with widespread corruption.
But Indonesia has every reason to confront the problem - rising sea levels threaten to drown many of the coutry's 17 000 islands.
Logging damage revealed by secret filming
Paul Eccleston Telegraph 28 Nov 07
Secret filming by villagers has revealed the damage being caused to the Indonesian rainforests by uncontrolled logging and palm oil plantations.
# In pictures: Papua natives learn to use the equipment
# Watch interviews with tribes: Tears of Mother Mooi | Defenders of the Tribal Boundaries
The ancient way of life of natives in Papua is being threatened by the wholesale destruction of their forests.
The Indonesian province is inaccessible to outsiders and closed to journalists so it was left to the villagers to expose the activities of the logging companies.
They were given digital camera equipment and taught how to use it by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which investigates and exposes environmental and wildlife crime, working with the Jakarta-based NGO Telapak.
The two conservation groups have been working with tribal communities in Papua to help them protect their forests from unsustainable exploitation and illegal logging.
A series of films released simultaneously in London and Jakarta, show the scale of destruction being caused to the forests which the villagers rely on almost entirely for food and shelter.
One was shot by the Mooi people who live in the Sorong regency of West Papua. It shows the relationship between the Mooi and their dependence on the forest lands and features undercover filming of logging.
Once a stretch of forest has been stripped bare it is replaced with palm oil plantations but in the process much of the wildlife - pigs, deer and birds which the villagers rely on for food - is driven out.
The film questions whether the logging began even before a licence was granted for 32,000 hectares of Mooi land to be turned over for plantation in 2006.
The film shows workers clearing the ancient forests with chain saws before bulldozers move in to level it for palm trees to be planted.
Mooi women in the film say the destruction of vast swathes of their forest make it more difficult for them to continue with their traditional weaving crafts making household items and sleeping mats from tree bark.
And tribal hunters say they now have to travel great distances to find game where previously it was abundant in their forests.
Another film shot in the Prafi plain, in the Arfak region of Manokwari regency in West Papua Province tells of the consequences of state-sponsored palm oil plantations.
Senior community figures were sent by the government to Medan in Sumatra in 1982 to bring oil palm back to their area. The film shows the consequences to local people who lose their rights to the land and see it destroyed.
Promises that palm oil would sustain them for generations fail to materialise and the plantations fall into neglect as they become unprofitable.
Villagers tell in the film how their rivers have been polluted by discharges of undiluted palm oil from a factory and how they develop rashes when they wash in it.
Ananias Muid, one of the villagers sent to learn about palm oil admits he now regrets the communities' involvement with it.
Paul Redman, who has worked on projects for EIA in Indonesia for five years, said: "These are the voices of local people, the voices of the forest - explaining the issues that directly affect them and their lives.
"They are films made by Papuans, about Papua - they are the real thing. They were researched, written and filmed by them."
Some of the film-makers' identities have been kept secret because of security concerns. "These people have worked extremely hard to bring these films together, sometimes at great personal risk.
"For example, one film-maker waited for four days in the forest to get footage of illegal loggers. Logging is a multi-million pound industry which impacts upon where they live.
"For them, the forest is their supermarket - when it is gone they have nothing and no access to any income either.
"They want these stories to be told and these stories have to be told - without their land, they have no hope."
