Activists protest Indonesia deforestation

INDONESIA: Indonesia is the world’s fastest destroyer of forests, eradicating 300 football fields’ worth every hour, environmental group Greenpeace said Friday as it staged a demonstration.

Activists dressed as loggers chain-sawed a 20-metre (65-foot) wooden wall in the capital, Jakarta, to symbolise the destruction, saying industrial and illegal logging were mainly to blame.

Greenpeace said data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation showed Indonesia destroyed nearly 1.9 million hectares (4.6 million acres) of forest annually between 2000 and 2005. But the official Indonesian figure was higher at 2.8 million hectares, it said.

Greenpeace Southeast Asia campaigner Hapsoro said a series of recent Indonesian natural disasters, such as floods, landslides and droughts, were all linked to the “unprecedented destruction” of forest cover.

“The government must realise that massive forest degradation in Indonesia is responsible for major disasters that killed a lot of Indonesians,” he said.

Only Brazil destroys more forest annually, but Indonesia’s smaller forest area puts its deforestation rate at 2 percent against Brazil’s 0.6 percent, the group said.

Greenpeace said it had written to the Guinness World Records to nominate Indonesia as the fastest destroyer of forests, based on its deforestation rate.

Jakarta, Friday, AFP