outdoors

On March 19 activists from the Greenpeace environmentalist organization boarded the MV Greveno, a cargo ship laden with wood that the group says was illegally taken from Indonesia’s Tanjung Puting National Park, an orangutan refuge which is also one of the last habitats of the threatened Sumatran tigers. Greenpeace had been observing the shipment, which is bound for Antwerp, since it was processed by the Korindo company in Indonesia. The group’s boats had been tailing the Grevano from the time it entered the European Union’s waters and after six failed attempts managed to put two of its activists aboard the ship.

Greenpeace called the shipment “nothing short of organized crime.” Indonesia’s forestry minister recently admitted that illegal logging is out of control in his country, while a World Bank report says that the situation in that country has become so severe that there is a danger of “a species extinction spasm of planetary proportions.” The environmentalists note that many EU countries have spoken out against the importation of illegal rainforest timber products, but complain that this verbal commitment has not been followed up by the enactment of effective European regulations to stop the practice.

It is not, said Greenpeace, merely a matter of saving large jungle cats and great apes. “Fifty million people depend on the rainforest for hunting, fishing and making rattan and honey,” the group pointed out in a press statement. “If the forest is lost, their livelihoods will be too.”




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Greenpeace boards ship loaded with illegal teak

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