The felling of elephant forests in Riau may seem remote, but businesses here are linked to plantations that do damage
Christy Williams, Straits Times 5 Jul 08;
SINGAPORE is clean, green and very easy on the eye. Yet most Singaporeans are blissfully unaware of the rapid loss of forests and biodiversity happening right next door.
Take the Riau province on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, just half an hour away by plane. It was considered a stronghold for Asian elephants in the 1980s. The province had tropical rainforests in abundance and elephants and tigers roamed everywhere.
Then came the boom in palm oil and a thirst for pulp to supply paper to the world. In the last decade, Riau has lost almost all of its 220,000ha of lowland rainforest, considered a cradle of biodiversity. Due to this massive habitat loss, the elephant-human conflict has skyrocketed there.
An appetite for crops
GENERALLY, each group of elephants, as well as big solitary adult bulls, needs to roam in a home range of 200 to 400 sq km. In large forest areas, where the home ranges are contained within forested habitat, there is very little conflict.
When small groups of humans move in and clear forests within an elephant's home range, they create either a crop field of paddy, wheat or sugar cane, or plantations of oil palm.
All this, to an elephant, is just another type of food which is in fact richer and tastier. They love to eat it.
Soon, they also discover that humans stock yet more gourmet food - salt, rice and sometimes rice beer - inside their flimsy and easy-to-push-down huts. It is inevitable that some elephants turn into house-raiders.
In face-to-face confrontations with a four- to five-tonne animal, people can get hurt or killed.
The situation worsens when more humans move in, clearing more forests before them and becoming more organised in their efforts to prevent the animals from taking their livelihood. This is when a full-blown elephant-human conflict happens.
Humans, in the absence of technical help and access to better and more humane mitigation methods, retaliate by throwing burning tyres, shooting with sharpened nails and using easily available pesticides as poisons.
If we want to save the elephants, we need to to save their forest habitats.
Human intrusions
PAPER and pulp or palm oil are not the only industries threatening the survival of elephants, tigers and rhinoceros in Sumatra.
In November 2006, I was called to an illegal coffee plantation inside the Bukit Barisan Selatan (BBS) National Park. My World Wildlife Fund (WWF) colleagues and Indonesian government partners had summoned me urgently to help deal with a crisis.
The people, whose livelihood was based on the illegal coffee plantations, were threatening to destroy the BBS elephant herd.
The herd, which numbered 30 in 2006, now comprised just six elephants. Although they were within the national park boundary, they were living on coffee plantations and posed a threat to the people there and their crops.
In fact, over 240 sq km of the national park had been converted to coffee plantations and now the elephants were being called aggressors.
We decided to develop an early-warning scheme using a Global Positioning System (GPS) collar fitted to one of the elephants.
This allowed us to monitor the elephants and warn villagers about approaching creatures, so they could vacate the village for the night or avoid going into a particular coffee plantation to prevent a confrontation with the elephants.
The easier solution would have been to do what Indonesians had been doing for a long time: capture the elephants and move them into captivity. This would mean, however, that a conservation battle had been lost once again.
The coffee plantations are still there and the WWF is trying to work out a solution with the big buyers and coffee growers to see if we can slowly reclaim some of the park's key areas.
The Singapore connection
WHEN the WWF began investigating the levers we could use to encourage better corporate responsibility by companies engaged in these businesses, we started finding Singapore links.
Financial institutions based in Singapore were connected to the two biggest paper and pulp industry players in Riau.
In the case of coffee grown on illegal plantations in Lampung Province, Sumatra, beans sold by small farmers were actually being shipped via Singapore by reputable companies.
Many of the people directly or indirectly involved in these businesses may have no idea that forests were being destroyed as a result of economic activities that had links to Singapore.
Creating awareness here about the plight of Riau's elephants, tigers and rhinos will go a long way towards changing the behaviour of players involved in the actual conversion of forests.
The WWF has now opened a Singapore office to create awareness among corporate and financial institutions about the need to protect Planet Earth and ensure a safe future for Singaporeans and other inhabitants of the Asean region. Eco-friendly products could be labelled so that consumers can choose those that have not damaged the environment.
At the individual level, people can make additional commitments to reduce their consumption. Every packet of creamer that we use for coffee, or ingredients used in items ranging from ice cream to toilet rolls, probably came from former habitats to highly endangered species such as elephants and tigers.
Companies producing goods such as palm oil must show clear commitment to stop cutting down forests. Institutions that make financial investments in plantations and other companies that clear tracts of land should insist that High Conservation Value Forest (HCVF) assessments are done in forest habitats.
What this means is that every forest block must be assessed against agreed criteria for what constitutes good elephant, tiger or rich biodiversity areas. Those areas identified as HCVF must be left alone and those falling outside of the criteria can be converted to human use.
At the end of last year, I received word that the group of elephants in BBS National Park, whose matriarch we had collared, had killed a woman and her young son in an illegal settlement within the park.
They were the only two people who had not moved despite being warned by our field team about the presence of elephants in the vicinity.
Maybe they didn't have anywhere to go.
A few days later, I was sent pictures from the field showing two of the elephants from the collared group lying dead, killed in retaliation.
As an elephant biologist, I was filled with utter despair for the fate of the elephants. As a father of two young children, I closed my eyes to imagine myself in that dark hut as marauding elephants milled around me and my children.
We need to awaken our social responsibility and take steps to ensure that our impact on these ordinarily gentle giants is minimised.
In doing so, we will limit the tragedies caused by human-elephant conflict.
The writer is an Asian large-mammal expert with the WWF, a global conservation body with offices here. The WWF, together with the Indonesian government, has established a 33,000ha national park in Tesso Nilo in Riau, an important elephant habitat.
