I apologize for my error.

A month ago I made the audacious statement that the rainforest movement had achieved a victory in protecting Indonesia's rainforests and orangutans from a huge oil palm plantation. I made this statement fully aware that Indonesia's rainforests were in frenzied crisis and hoping that supporting those in government working to conserve rainforests from such atrocities could make a positive difference.

This hope has proven fleeting. I now realize I was wrong, am retracting the victory claim, and have realized there is little or no hope for Indonesia's large and intact ancient rainforests. I apologize for my error.

So writes Dr. Glen Barry of the Rainforest Portal and I trumpetted the news too.

But then I backtracked having noted that I couldn't find any verification. I also suggested that folk write to SBY.

And now, like Dr. Glen, I don't know what to suggest other than read the in-depth article by Jane Perlez of the New York Times.

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.

Overall, Indonesia says it expects China to invest $30 billion in the next decade, a big infusion of capital that contrasts with the declining investment here and in the region by American companies.

Much of that Chinese investment is aimed at the extractive industries, along with infrastructure like refineries, railroads and toll roads to help speed the flow of Indonesia's On April 19, Indonesia announced that China had placed a $1 billion rush order for 800,000 cubic meters, or 28.2 million cubic feet, of an expensive red- 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 1990s, stripping large swaths 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 would "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."

 

postID=114629875064709442

¶ 3:00 pm