Prince of Wales heads to Sumatra to promote rainforests

Valentine Low, Times Online 2 Nov 08;

The Prince of Wales yields to noone in his love of rainforests, but sometimes it is a love that is hard won. Yesterday he made an epic journey through the storm-lashed tropics, along dirt roads made all but impassable by the rain, to visit a camp that he believes could represent the saving of the world’s rainforests.

It is a subject close to his heart; and nothing was going to stop him getting there. The Harapan rainforest is on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where illegal loggers have cut vast swaths out of the forest over the years. Three times the size of the Isle of Wight - more than 100,000 hectares - it is now being turned around by a consortium determined to show that rainforests can, in the Prince’s words, be “worth more alive than dead”.

Saving the rainforest is one thing: getting there is another. Harapan is three hours’ drive from the nearest town, a difficult journey at the best of times. At the start of the rainy season, when dirt tracks have been turned into mudbaths, it is one only embarked upon by the brave.

As the Prince’s convoy set out from the regional capital of Jambi, the short stretch of tarmac soon gave way to a forest road pitted with ruts and craters where the only way across the numerous rivers that criss-cross the landscape was by rickety wooden bridges that looked as if they would scarcely bear the weight of the large 4x4s carrying the Prince and his party — now lacking the Duchess of Cornwall, who has returned to Britain.

The 4x4s might have been able to cope with the road - the police water cannon truck could not. Quite what protests the police were expecting that they felt it necessary to send a water cannon into the jungle was unclear, but once it had crashed into a ditch it was not going to be much use in a riot. For 20 minutes it also looked as if it was going to prevent the convoy reaching its destination, until a tow truck appeared to drag it out of the way.

If the journey to the forest was less than straightforward, the Prince - not a man who appreciates delay - did not seem unduly concerned; according to one of his party, he found it all “just hilarious”. More pertinently, he no doubt thought it a price worth paying for reaching a place which highlights perfectly the problems faced by the world’s rainforests. Twenty years ago, Harapan - home to 10 per cent of the world’s surviving Sumatran tigers - was twice the size it is today, but loggers and the palm oil industry have caused serious deforestation.

The resulting damage is about more than the loss of trees. At the Harapan Base Camp, a small community of wooden huts on stilts run by the RSPB and Birdlife, the Prince heard an impassioned plea from a local villager who, like so many others in the area, was forced off his land by the palm growers.

“All we want to do is grow our rice,” said Hasan Bada, 51, who has to support a family of 12 on an income of £2 a day. “Our community is very poor. I find it very difficult to feed my family.” The consortium is trying to help by creating jobs - as forest rangers, or in the nursery where trees are raised before being planted out - and researching better methods for growing crops such as fruit trees.

In the future, they hope to raise money by encouraging eco-tourism.

At the end of his tour the Prince, who was wearing chinos, suede boots and a safari jacket, planted a tree, giving the trowelful of compost an appreciate sniff before he put it in the hole, then stamping it down with his boot. He must have planted hundreds of trees in his time, but that must have been one of the most remote.

What with the tree planting and tramping round the forest, the time he had finished at Harapan the normally sartorially fastidious Prince found himself with a pair of trousers that were proof that the rainforest in the wet season can be a very muddy place. But once again the Prince did not seem to mind; he was muddy, but happy.