Animals Die with the Forest

INDONESIA'S tropical rainforests are disappearing 30 per cent faster than previously estimated as illegal loggers raid large national parks, threatening the long-term survival of orang utans, according to a United Nations report released on Monday.

The Indonesian authorities recently intercepted shipments totalling 70,000 cu m - about 3,000 truckloads - of illegal timber and arrested several people, but loggers were clearing an estimated 2.1 million ha of forest a year for timber worth US$4 billion (S$6 billion), said the report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Only about 7,000 Sumatran orang utans and about 50,000 Borneo orang utans now exist in the wild.

'The populations are crashing dramatically,' said Ms Melanie Virtue of UNEP's Great Apes Survival Project, which carried out the study.

The number of Sumatran orang utans has fallen 91 per cent in the last century, based on studies of the number of apes in today's dense forests, said Mr Ian Redmond, also of the Great Apes Survival Project.

It is not known how much the population of the Borneo orang utans has declined.
Orang utans fleeing overlogged areas have ended up in 'refugee camps' run by the UNEP project.

Indonesian rescue centres now have about 1,000 orang utans, and the illegal trade in young orang utans for private zoos and safari parks has increased to 'significant numbers', the report said, without specifying further.

Earlier forecasts have said Indonesia's natural rainforest would be seriously degraded by 2032.
But projections based on new satellite surveillance suggest that 98 per cent of lowland forest will be destroyed by 2022, and many protected areas will be gone within the next five years, said the report, called 'The Last Stand of the Orang Utan'.

Orang utans breed only once in seven years, meaning their numbers struggle to recover even without the loss of their habitat.

But the report said orang utans have shown they can survive selective logging. Evidence from Ketgambe and Gunung Leuser in Sumatra showed their numbers declined after large trees were extracted from the forest, but rebounded as the forest regenerated.

The report was released at the triennial meeting of the 171-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites).

The 1975 Cites treaty prohibits all trade in orang utans except by special permit.

The report said illegal loggers were operating in 37 out of 41 Indonesian national parks. Further pressure came from plantation owners clearing forests for palm oil trees to meet the demand for biofuels.

The report estimates that up to 88 per cent of all Indonesian timber is logged illegally and usually shipped abroad after being processed into lumber in saw mills or used as pulp.