Indonesia

Rainbow Man, originally uploaded by sektordua.

Save the Forest for our future
by: arysaputra

Forestry is an important sector of Indonesia’s economy. In the 1980s, it contributed an average 16% of total foreign exchange earnings annually, with forest-related employment accounting for about 5.4% of the total labor force. Prior to the colonial era, 90% of the country was forested; up to 1966, 75% was still covered by tropical forest; in the 1970s, large-scale commercial forest exploitation began to take place which ended up with the timber boom; and in 2000, forest cover was only 58% of the land area. The annual rate of forest loss averaged 1.2% between 1990 and 2000, with illegal logging identified as the major culprit for this rapid rate of deforestation and forest degradation.