Deforestation leading to fewer resources, more disasters – Indonesia is clearing its forests faster than any other country, Greenpeace says.
MUARA SIAU, 1 July 2010 (IRIN): Wisnawati used to make three million rupiah (325 US dollar) a month tapping rubber trees, but now, after years of rampant deforestation, she farms rice and coffee and is lucky to bring in half that each month.
– We used to get everything we needed from the forest – wood for our homes, our daily meals. We can’t do that any more because there’s just not enough, said Wisnawati, 35, who owns a small farm in Lubuk Birah, a village of about 350 people in Indonesia’s Muara Siau City, Jambi Province.
For generations villagers have extracted and sold honey and nilam plant oil – used as cooking oil and to make cosmetics.
But most have had to find a secondary source of income as resources run thin, the result of a 20-year selective logging concession held by an Indonesian timber company on 490 sqkm of Merangin District forest surrounding the village.
Home to 10 percent of the world’s tropical rainforest, Indonesia is clearing its forests faster than any other country, losing 51 sqkm a day, according to Greenpeace.
Indonesia is now the world’s third-biggest emitter of greenhouses gases, mostly thanks to deforestation and degradation, and Jambi has already lost two-thirds of its virgin forest.
Farmers say animals forced out of their natural habitat by deforestation are wreaking havoc in the village. – There are thousands of pigs around now. They destroy our crops, said Dahlan, a 52-year-old farmer.
Last year, 13 people in Merangin were mauled to death by tigers whose habitats had been destroyed, said Arif Munandar, director of the Jambi office of Friends of the Earth Indonesia (Walhi).
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