Sumatra: Oil palm crop takes over forest at a football field a minute

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.

Matt Aman grew up in the lush tropical lowland rain
forest of Sumatra. Tigers padded through the underbrush, rarely seen
and silent as shadows. “It made my skin prickle,” the indigenous
leader recalled recently as he sat on the floor of a stick hut
surrounded by fellow villagers. “When I was young, it was easy to find
the mouse deer, monitor lizard, and wild pigs,” Aman said. The birds
were majestic, too, he said, as he nodded and lit a cigarette. They
filled the forest with a chorus of coos and trills that woke the Kubu
village every morning.

“We never hear those birds anymore,” Aman said.
It is easy to see why. The storybook forest of his youth, the great
green riot of reeds and vines, the cathedral-like thickets of fruit
and hardwood trees — all of it is gone. In its place, for mile after
monotonous mile, is a rolling carpet of palm trees, not the kind that
sway in the wind at Waikiki, but a shorter, pudgier variety — the oil
palm — that like corn and soybeans is rapidly becoming one of the
world’s major sources of biofuel. Roughly the size of California,
Sumatra is the sixth largest island in the world. But it is home to
fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers, down from around 1,000 in the 1980s.
Historical population figures are sketchy. But the big cat is believed
to have lost 80 percent of its natural habitat over the past century,
reducing the tigers to scattered groups in increasingly beleaguered
forest oases.

“The tiger is going to go extinct if we don’t do
something,” a wildlife biologist named Sunarto told me in Pekanbaru,
the steamy capital of Sumatra’s Riau province, a center of oil palm
plantingFor his part, Sunarto is working to persuade oil palm managers
to leave strategic corridors of forest around plantations untouched so
the endangered big cats do not become genetically isolated. But it’s a
struggle.

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 Ph.D. through
Virginia Polytechnic Institute. “The animals are gone. There are many
places like that.”

“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.”
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2112