What could be the alternative and sustainable choices to the Indonesian economy and to provide stable incomes and permanent jobs for the local people?
Borneo is the third largest island in the world. Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei share the territory, with 73% belonging to Indonesia. The island has 140 million year old rainforest, and 43 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves underneath. There are 13 million of the Dayak tribal people, and other forest-dependent indigenous communities resided here for generations. This vast region hosts a myriad of species, and many endemic flora and fauna. It is the home for orangutan, Asian elephant, Indonesian rhino, and Borneo clouded leopard. The island historically has an extensive ancient forest cover, but was sharply deforested over the past 40 years. Some observers estimate in northern Borneo only 20% of the virgin forests remain standing, and in southern Borneo only 30%.
Borneo is the supply source for half of global tropical timber, since its cheap cost of cutting, milling, gluing, and transportation to all over the world. This hardwood species is known as a family of Philippine Mahogany; it can be used as plywood to produce furniture, cabinet, photo frame, and car interior. With the rapid growing demand for the wood, foreign companies, government background concessions, and local private businesses flushed into the region and destroyed large areas. The roads built and water route developed for the concessions opened the area for illegal logging, for these acts come with nearly no consequences, a source suggested that 88% of the logging within the region is “illegal in some ways.” (1)
Indonesia is leading the world in palm oil production. What is palm oil? According to the Rainforest Action Network, palm oil can be found in almost half of the products in grocery stores, it is used as ingredient for food, snack, and health care product; it can also be used for extraction of biofuel. Since the world’s demand for palm oil (only food alone) is expected to double in the next decade, within Indonesia, oil palm plantation expanded from 600,000 hectares in 1985 to over 6 million hectares by 2007. Indonesian government once planned to increase the production to 20 million tons in 2009 and 40 million tons in 2020 (2); however, in fact, it has already exceeded 58 million tons in 2014. Driven by the economic interest, the majority of Borneo Island has been licensed for plantation and logging. (3)
Before the 1980s, Indonesian government heavily relied on oil revenue, along with the decline of oil price in the 80s, the Indonesian government channeled its economy to cheap forest and repressed labor. Some failed actions were taken: in 1996, a government project called “Mega Rice” was initiated on the southern section of the island. The goal was to turn the forest into rice paddies to help with the food shortage within the country. The government migrated a tremendous amount of labor from outside of the island; a large investment was made on the project but it has eventually failed and abandoned. The former president, General Suharto earlier drafted the concessions and then handed over to the military officials, and the Forestry Minister of the time Abdul Taib Mahmud in order to gain political allies; consequently, some of these concessions were handed out to the businessmen and foreign enterprises. With the up tide of globalization, companies started the exploitation of the forests. The relationships among the former dictatorship, the current regime, the foreign conglomerates, and the government official’s family businesses are crisscrossed and corrupted; however, without transparencies, it is difficult to find out how were the relationships formed and what will they developed into.
The deforestation and forest degradation puts some of the endemic species on the brink, such as orangutan, Asian elephant, pangolin and arowana. Among these endangered creatures, the one that we are most attached to is the orangutan; a gentle and intelligent primate with red shaggy hair, strong family bonds, and possible language capabilities. Due to the destruction to the forest, some of them got burned in the fire and some of them were caught or killed in the isolated “islands” left by the logging; some of the baby orangutans lost their mothers and their survival abilities in the wild. Scientist Pongo Abelii indicates that the Sumatran Orangutans (mostly live in the Malaysian side) only have 6000 left, the Borneo Orangutans only have 15,000 left in wild. Even there are organizations such as “Orangutan Foundation International” leading by Dr.Galdikas trying to save these endangered oragutans, the threat of extinction is still very real.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G32YehcdUAw
“Dayak” is a collective term for over 200 ethnic groups located primarily in the island of Borneo, about a quarter of the 13 million people that live in Borneo are the Dayak; each has its own dialect, custom, law, territory, and culture. For the combinations of forest concessions, plantations, and migrants from the main land, their living area has been reduced; their culture and tribal laws were violated. The government made Amendments to the land code, and enabled forest officers to “move out native people and confiscate belongings”(4). The Dayak people share deep bonds with the forest; they grow food, find medicines and hunting in the jungle. This relationship made them the “masters of the forest” by “using forest through the forest management and shifting cultivation, small Dayak villages have historically been able to live sustainably off large areas of land”(5). But today, the Dayak people are forced to tread carefully between the government and the International Conservation NGO’s that assist them in retaking their original rights.
Deforestation and forest degradation account for up to 20% of global man-made carbon dioxide. Indonesia is now the # 5 country of greenhouse gas emitter (by the World Resource Institute). The land in Borneo is peat forest soil that consists large accumulations of some ten thousands of year old organic matter; some of them are more then 20 feet deep; they hold at least 57 billion tons of carbons. When the concessions removed the timbers, the ground needs clearance before plantations, people often burn to clear the surface of the soil, sometime these fires last for weeks and months, thus release huge amount of dioxides into the atmosphere. The waves of haze from the peat swap fire on Borneo drift across its neighbor countries, causing health issues to the people.
The conservation of the Borneo rainforest is vital to our environment. The trees help regulate the climate by storing hundreds of billion tons of carbon in their living parts, and release oxygen through the photosynthesis process. According to the emission studies, the destruction of forest contributes one fifth of the global carbon emissions, it is equal to all cars, ships, planes and trains combined.
A well-managed forest provides reliable water resource to the indigenous communities and the aquatic creatures. When the system is destructed, siltation and sulphuric acid polluted the river, and the streams carried the chemical to the downstream, not only makes the water undrinkable but also caused an unbalance to the river ecosystem.
Indonesia is one of the newest democratic countries in the world, it’s population ranks behind China, India, and the US. Approximately 70% of its population lives in rural areas, and agriculture is the main source of income. Beyond its own interests, the Indonesian government officials considered the forest utilization was a necessary act to the increase the GDP, labor participate level and local employment; above all, to help the poverty. To a certain degree it is, even “the poor are benefiting relatively little from Indonesia’s growth”. (6) However, as we see the effect caused by the deforestation and forest degradation, what could be the alternative and sustainable choices to the Indonesian economy and to provide stable incomes and permanent jobs for the local people?
Reference
- Environmental Investigation Agency and Telepak (2004) Profiting from Plunder: How Malaysia Smuggles Endangered Wood.
- Threats to Borneo Forests. WWF global.
- Gaveau, D. L., Sloan, S., Molidena, E., Yaen, H., Sheil, D., Abram, N. K., Ancrenaz, M., … Meijaard, E. (January 01. 2014). Four decades of forest persistence, clearance and logging on Borneo. Plos One, 9, 7.
- Claire Burgess. Hill tribe populations of Borneo, Human Rights & the State
5. Summer, Amicus, Borneo on the Brink, 1994
6. The Economist, Muted Music, May 3rd 2014
