The cost of the biofuel boom: destroying Indonesia’s forests

Not long ago, he journeyed to a research site only to find the area cleared and burned to make way for an oil palm plantation. “The trees are gone,” said Sunarto, who is working on a PhD through Virginia Polytechnic Institute. “The animals are gone. There are many places like that.”

According to Indonesia’s own figures, 9.4 million acres of forest have been planted with oil palm since 1996, an area larger than New Hampshire and Connecticut combined. That works out to 2,000 acres a day, or about one football field a minute. Indonesia is the Kuwait of palm oil. Only Malaysia, which has less at stake biologically, produces more.

“This isn’t mowing your lawn or putting up a factory on the outskirts of town,” said Stephen Brend, a zoologist and field conservationist with the London-based Orangutan Foundation. “It’s changing everything as far as the eye can see.”

Like tigers, orangutans - which are found only in Sumatra and Borneo - are also being nudged into increasingly isolated population units by rain forest destruction. Their numbers are dropping, too. But because there are more of them - between 45,000 and 69,000 in Borneo and 7,300 in Sumatra - extinction is not an imminent threat.

“They are still going to be in the wild, but in fragmented populations that can never meet,” Brend told me one evening. “And if it’s reduced to that, we’ve just lost everything. It’s not only the orangutans. It’s what you lose alongside them - the birds, insects, pollinators, all the environmental services that forests give, as well as a thing of beauty.”

Indonesia has long been known for its heavy-handed logging and plantation clearing. Rain forests fall faster in Indonesia, in fact, than almost anywhere else on earth. But Riaz Saehu, a spokesman for the Indonesia Embassy in Washington, DC, told me that under the country’s new president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who took power in October 2004, the era of widespread clearing for oil palm may be coming to a close.

“There is an effort to reduce plantation expansion,” Saehu said. “What we do now is basically to promote sustainability.”

Many scientists are sceptical. “After 23 years there, I must say they can talk the talk but never walk the walk,” Lisa Curran, director of Yale University’s Tropical Resources Institute, told me in an e-mail. “The richest folks in Indonesia are owners of these oil palm plantations, so the corruption and patronage are linked to the very top of the food chain and power structures.”

In 2006, Curran was awarded a so-called MacArthur genius award for her work on deforestation in Indonesia. “Oil palm is a disaster all the way around for biodiversity if converted from logged forest or peat swamp,” she said. “Oil palm is fine if they actually put it on totally degraded lands - but they don’t.”

Even if new planting were stopped tomorrow, it would be too late for the Kubu people I met in Sumatra, whose once-rich rain forest pantry has been stripped bare by an oil palm plantation. “I have lost my garden,” a Kubu woman named Anna told me. “I cannot grow the rubber, bananas, chillies, and other things I need to feed my family.”

A plantation oil palm tree grew in her front yard. Not long ago, Anna said, plantation workers even bulldozed Kubu homes to plant oil palm.

“We tried to stop them,” she said. “We started crying. But the man said, ‘Keep quiet or I’ll take you to the police.’”