Twenty-five years ago, Papuan tribal leader Ananias Muit was sent from his jungle home to Indonesia's Sumatra island by the local government to learn about lucrative palm oil, and bring it back.
A new short film, "Defenders of the Tribal Boundaries", tells how the arrival of a state-owned plantation company soon afterwards devastated Muit's community in the Arfak mountains of Papua's Bird's Head region. "'Give us the land and we will give the money to plant,' they said. 'We will bring a palm oil plantation,'" Muit says, repeating the government's promise.
Instead, the forests were cleared, but factory effluent polluted the local river, making the water supply unusable. "The promise was sweet, but now it is bitter," he laments. "We were not compensated for our land or even thanked. Now we are really suffering, and we regret it."
The film, one of four locally-made shorts that highlight the shocking impact of deforestation in remote Papua, will be featured at a UN climate change conference on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, which begins next week. The 10-minute clips, shot by aid workers using handheld digital cameras over the past three months, demonstrate the impact expanding palm oil plantations and other destructive logging is having on local communities.
Indonesia is losing its forests at the world's fastest rate, with some two million hectares (4.9 million acres) disappearing each year, according to environmental watchdog Greenpeace. Up to 80 percent of logging in Indonesia is estimated to be illegal -- due to a lack of political will to crack down as well as negligible law enforcement -- but the films demonstrate that even legal logging has far-reaching and negative consequences.
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http://www.terradaily.com/2007/071201023621.uwy1ld61.html
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