China: Forests in Southeast Asia Fall to Prosperity's Ax(Chicom to clean it out?)

NYT ^ | 04/29/06

[TigerLikesRooster]

April 29, 2006 Forests in Southeast Asia Fall to Prosperity's Ax By JANE PERLEZ LONG ALONGO, Indonesia — For as long as anyone can remember, Anyie Apoui and his people have lived among the majestic trees and churning rivers in an untouched corner of Borneo, catching fish and wild game, cultivating rice and making do without roads. But all that is about to change.

The Indonesian government has signed a deal with China that will level much of the remaining tropical forests in an area so vital it is sometimes called the lungs of Southeast Asia.

For China, the deal is a double bounty: the wood from the forest will provide flooring and furniture for its ever-expanding middle class, and in its place will grow vast plantations for palm oil, an increasingly popular ingredient in detergents, soaps and lipstick.

The forest-to-palm-oil deal, one of an array of projects that China said it would develop in Indonesia as part of a $7 billion investment spree last year, illustrates the increasingly symbiotic relationship between China's need for a wide variety of raw materials, and its Asian neighbors' readiness to provide them, often at enormous environmental cost.

For Mr. Anyie and his clan, the deal will bring jobs and the opportunity for a modern life. "We love our forest, but I want to build the road for my people — I owe it to them," said Mr. Anyie, 63, an astute elder of the Dayak people. "We've had enough of this kind of living."

From Indonesia to Malaysia to Myanmar, many of the once plentiful forests of Southeast Asia are already gone, stripped legally or illegally, including in the low-lying lands here in Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo. Only about half of Borneo's original forests remain.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Cutting down forests and create plantations, this is what colonial powers used to do. Judging from what China did with their country, I doubt that they can manage this thing well.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Ping!

[nuconvert]

What are the chances the environmentalists will scream about this?

[Paddlefish]

Here's the problem. According to the environmentalist extremists' alarmist views from the '70's, (and I consider myself an environmentalist), we have now run out of oil, the Amazon rain forest is long gone, and we are freezing in an ice age, etc. We just can't accept these catastrophic claims any more.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #4

I know, but Chinese regime has good record of worst fear of enviro's actually coming true. They are communists, after all. Just as Soviets managed to dry up Aral Sea.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #3

they could make muffled and sheepish scream. More pleading than protesting.:)

[B.O. Plenty]

Maybe they should go to Bejing and have a protest in front of the forbidden palace....heh heh heh

[spokeshave]

Figures...the Chinese put a hefty tax on chopsticks as they almost run out of wood.

China today...the highest form of communism....runs out of clean air, water, wood and female children.

[Brian Allen]

<< What are the chances the (excretionmentalists) will scream about this? >>

None.

"Environmentalists" hide their communism, satanism and/or Pagan-Heathen Pantheism behind that fraudulent banner.

Just as the very worst of the world's racketeers, thugs, gangsters, counterfeiters, liars, looters, thieves and mass-murderers, posing as "politicians," hide their real intentions and activities behind the illusion of "communism."