Asia Times: Hardwood ban a lifeline for endangered orangutan


	August 18, 2001	atimes.com

China

Hardwood ban a lifeline for endangered orangutan
By Danielle Knight

WASHINGTON - Asia's only great ape - the threatened orangutan - stands to gain from an international ban on the export of a rare type of wood from Indonesia, say conservationists. The ban, on the export of ramin timber and wood products, went into effect last week. The chief importers were the United States, Europe, Japan and China.

The Indonesian government had imposed its own ban in April amid concern about illegal logging of the valuable hardwood. The international ban was put in place by the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

The global treaty now lists ramin as an Appendix III species with zero quota, which means all importing countries are required to seize shipments of ramin if they are not accompanied by a CITES export permit issued by Indonesian officials.

Ramin, in demand for furniture, flooring, wood panels, toys and other products, is found in Malaysia - where it is known as "Malaysian beech" - and within several of Indonesia's national parks. These reserves also provide habitat for orangutans. The ape species - found mostly on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo - are highly dependent on ramin trees for food and nesting and use them to move through the forest by vine and branch.

The United States is one of the world's largest importers of ramin timber and products, with more than US$12 million worth of the wood brought over from Indonesia last year, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a wildlife advocacy group based in London and Washington. "The ban on ramin from Indonesia provides American consumers with a real chance to help save the orangutans from death and extinction," says Allan Thornton, the group's president.

Conservationists say they lobbied heavily for the international ramin ban because they are worried about the orangutans' survival. The great ape's numbers in the wild have declined by 50 percent in the last 20 years and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates their population has fallen by more than 90 percent over the past century. The ape's population is dwindling, say researchers, because logging and forest fires are destroying as much as 80 percent of orangutan habitat in Indonesia.

Today, fewer than 25,000 orangutans remain in the wild. Indonesia is home to 80 percent of the world's remaining orangutans, primate researchers estimate.

In August 1999, following five months of undercover field investigations, EIA and Telapak, an Indonesian environmental group based in Bogor, released a report, entitled "The Final Cut", that said corrupt officials allowed illegal logging to escalate in two of Indonesia's most important national parks, Tanjung Puting and Gunung Leuser. Both parks are havens for orangutans and other endangered species, including the Sumatran rhino, Asian elephant, clouded leopard, and Sumatran tiger.

In Tanjung Park in Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, where about 500 orangutans live, "massive illegal logging has devastated much of the ape's habitat", EIA says in the report.

Both groups pressed Indonesian government officials to close illegal sawmills in the area and prosecute the individuals involved. By December of last year, the sawmills in Gunung Leuser Park had been closed down and illegal logging vastly reduced in Tanjung Puting National Park.

While praising the new international ban on ramin, environmentalists remain concerned that a logging exemption given to an Indonesian company could make monitoring the illegal cutting of ramin more difficult. PT Diamond Raya was awarded a certificate by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in April to log about 90,000 hectares of rainforest in Sumatra. The Mexico-based FSC certifies that the wood comes from forests that are managed according to principles and criteria endorsed by large international conservation groups including the WWF.

Before the international ban on ramin was in place, US activists urged individual retail chains to stop importing the rare hardwood. After a two-year pressure campaign organized by the California-based Rainforest Action Network (RAN), the nation's two largest home improvement stores, Home Depot and Lowe's, announced they would eliminate from their sprawling warehouse stores wood products from endangered forests over the next several years. While Home Depot is still on its way to fully implementing its plan, Lowe's had already stopped buying ramin, according to Michael Brune, old-growth forest campaign director at RAN.

(Inter Press Service)

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