Feature: Eco-tourism at risk in Indonesia
July 10th, 2007
Indonesia has announced it will stage a “Visit Indonesia Year” in 2008 — but tourist packages may not include visits to its once pristine tropical forests, savanna grasslands, and lowland forests, as unprecedented deforestation threatens to wipe out these magnificent habitats.
The Culture and Tourism Ministry hopes to attract 6 million foreign tourists and generate around US$5 billion in foreign exchange earnings. As part of the promotion, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono officiated at the opening ceremony of the annual Bali Arts Festival in Denpasar on Saturday, and the national airline Garuda sponsored a “Bali Food Festival” in Beijing. The Indonesian Arts Institute is planning an International Arts Festival in November, to draw experts in arts and culture from Europe, Australia, the United States and other Asian countries.
Environmental groups hope some of this revenue will go toward protecting Indonesia’s unique natural assets. Rully Sumada, forest expert at environmental group Walhi, says that 60 percent of the country’s protected and conservation areas have been badly damaged by
illegal logging and palm oil plantations. She believes that at the current rate of deforestation, at 2.8 million hectares a year, forests in Sumatra, Borneo, and Sulawesi will be gone by 2012 while forests in Papua and elsewhere will be wiped out by 2022 due to the continued felling of trees.
Greenpeace Southeast Asia said the Guinness World Records had accepted its proposal to include Indonesia in its 2008 record book as the country with the fastest rate of deforestation in the world. Indonesia’s forests cover roughly 91 million hectares and harbor diverse life forms that include 11 percent of the world’s plant species, 10 percent of mammal species, and 16 percent of bird species — rich resources for eco-tourism.
However, revenues yielded by plantation crops like cocoa, rubber, and oil, and trading in wood and paper pulp are reportedly more lucrative than tourism, which explains the systematic exploitation and destruction of this fragile eco-system by a series of Indonesian leaders, who used revenues from the forest industry for political and personal gains. While the Suharto regime profited handsomely by trading wood, paper pulp and plantation crops like cocoa, rubber, and oil, they virtually ignored the sustainable management and development of these areas.
A series of tragedies — the Asian financial crisis in the late nineties, Bali bombing in 2002 and tsunami in 2004 — and other external factors sent the tourism industry into a tailspin for years. However, two decades of aggressive growth in Indonesia’s pulp, plywood, and paper industries strained legal supplies of wood fiber, resulting in illegal logging and poor forest management. More than 20 million hectares of forestland, cleared in 1985 for such purposes as industrial timber plantations and estate crop plantations like oil remain idle and unutilized.
Though the government provides statistics on tourist spending and hotel room occupancies, no accurate estimates are available for forest areas cleared by small-scale farmers, though shifting cultivators are believed to cause up to 20 percent of forest loss, according to the “State of the Forest” report compiled by Forest Watch Indonesia and the World Resources Institute. Also, the government’s transmigration program that relocated people from densely populated Java to other outer Islands is responsible for about 2 million hectares of forest clearance between 1960 and 1999.
The deliberate burning of forests to make way for plantations, combined with unusual weather patterns due to climate changes, led to uncontrolled wildfires resulting in the loss of 10 million hectares of forestland between 1994 and 1998. There have been no significant efforts at reforesting the burnt scrubby areas.
Continued periodic setting of forest fires has also affected tourism, flights, and closure of airports, and affected other services like hotel rooms, tours, and the food and beverage industry.
The illegal felling and export of Merbau trees — the most valuable hardwood in Southeast Asia, has benefited government officials, illegal loggers and powerful timber barons. If the inflow of tourist dollars has helped the economy, the systematic pillaging of Indonesia’s forests and illegal wood exports from Aceh to Papua, to feed the global demand for wood has left the environment in complete disarray.
Environmentalists warn that vast tracts of forestland cleared to meet the growing global demand for bio-fuels have aided the destruction to biodiversity through the effects of deforestation. The technique of clearing land for plantations has emitted large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while destroying the natural habitats of endangered species like the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger.
While the Indonesian government has maintained its commitment on preserving virgin forests, experts say that efforts often lack funds and resources to fight the constant threats from illegal and ruthless loggers. The Environmental Investigation agency and its Indonesian partner Telepak has called Indonesia’s rampant deforestation an “environmental crime of unimaginable scale that continues to unfold across Indonesia.” They have also blamed the inadequacy of a judiciary that does little to curb such activities.
Culture and Tourism Minister Jero Wacik, announcing plans for the Visit Indonesia year, said, “We will be out of sight to the rest of the world if we don’t take effective and immediate action to raise awareness among overseas tourists that Indonesia is a safe and attractive place to visit.”
With the focus on tourism and economic growth, awareness of Indonesia’s declining natural habitats has fallen on blind eyes, which could have a catastrophic effect on the global environment and world economy.
SHAILESH PALEKAR - United Press International, Asia - Hong Kong,China
Entry Filed under: World Tourism News
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