As everyone knows, Indonesia suffered major financial problems last year due to the Asian economic crisis; they had to be bailed out by the IMF and were in turn to accept IMF-dictated economic reforms as part of the conditions for the package; Indonesia had to improve its balance of payments fast and the obvious target was Indonesia's natural assets; rainforests, natural gas and oil and minerals.The practical effect of this has been to cause a logging boom in Borneo, especially the Kalimantan peat forests; clearcut logging of trees has increased from its pre-crisis levels of 0.6 to 1.3 million hectares per year. The logging has increased at a huge rate; especially the amount of illegal logging, which is much harder to document than the officially-approved logging. There are always companies, Western and Eastern, ready to exploit these sources of timber; the market is hungry for cheap timber; it was announced in January that the Indonesian Government is set to sell off another 3 million hectares of forest - that's legal logging as distinct from illegal logging.
Indonesia is in a cleft stick here; it must meet those IMF criteria set by the West, as it cannot afford to default. Yet it is having to gut its natural resources in order to meet them. Among other things, this has resulted in clearing forest land for use as rice paddies; a praticularly hare-brained scheme of the unlamented Suharto, as rice doesn't grow particularly well on the ex-forest land.
(It's worth observing that large amounts of money that would otherwise be used on more useful projects goes into the coffers of Western arms firms due to the essentially freedom-loving nature of the Indonesian government.)
Unfortunately, the Kalimantan area is ecologically very sensitive; it's the world's largest peat bog and the logging causes it to dry out. And as everyone knows, if you set a fire to dry peat it will burn and keep burning slowly and smokily.
Result; forest fires have been going on there for 1.5 years; species like the orang-utang are endangered already without this as well. The smoke caused has caused health damage as far afield as Malaysia and this habitat is being lost. Here's the additional catch; the peat bogs are extremely carbon-rich; burning them causes a large amount of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere; it is estimated that burning all of the peat bog could increase the atmospheric levels of CO2 by one sixth - enough to cause a global mean temperature rise estimated at 3 degrees C. That's in addition to other sources of carbon dioxide which could cause their own rise of 2-3 degrees C.
How can the IMF deal with this? Where is there any suggestion that this information figures anywhere in their plans? The IMF and the WTO are partially responsible (along with the timber companies), for destroying a large part of the world's rainforests.
In short, what gives anyone the idea that the financiers are remotely concerned about the environment? They are insisting that countries meet totally unrealistic financial performance targets, requiring that countries commit massive damage to their ecologies in order to comply.
Yet it is also the common people in such countries that are the first to suffer when the forest land no longer grows things, or when foreign imports become so expensive due to currency deflation that they are physically unable to by things we Westerners take for granted.
(the price of a hamburger in Jakarta is two and a half times the average daily wage.)
I find it extremely hard to believe the assertion that the poor countries of the world are benefitting at the expense of the West
- we leant them the money in the first place; it was in dollars, as dollars were/are the world currency, then the US overproduced dollars, reducing the dollar's real worth and making the repayment task of the developing world impossible to all intents and purposes.
Gideon.
