(No subject)

[Guest guest]

I try to be positive,

but when ever I hear WWF is involved I can't help but be cautious

anyway this seems like a good plan

all the best

Craig

 

 

 

 

 

WASHINGTON - The US timber industry and two major environmental groups will send wood to Indonesia to prevent depletion of that country's tropical forests by post-tsunami reconstruction, the groups said on Wednesday.

 

 

Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund signed a pact with the American Forest & Paper Association to provide US wood to help Indonesia's Aceh province rebuild homes and schools destroyed in last December's tsunami. "Without imported timber, pressure will increase to illegally log the remaining tropical forests, threatening their existence," they said in a statement, noting that a timber business-environmentalist pairing was an "unusual alliance." The biggest tsunami on record slammed into Aceh on Dec. 26, leaving 160,000 dead and a half-million homeless. Aceh lies on the island of Sumatra, whose forests are habitat for endangered orangutans and tigers and rare tropical plants. "Such help is critical because our province is more than 60 percent forest, but only 15 percent of that can be harvested," said Aceh's acting governor Azwar Abubakar. The government has imposed a moratorium on logging in Aceh since 2001, he added. "We need more than one million cubic meters of wood to rebuild homes and schools," he told Reuters in Washington. Abubakar, who lost his wife in the tsunami, said the government expects it will need to build 100,000 homes at $3,000 each in Aceh and hopes to have half of those units built by the end of this year. The partnership is collecting donated wood from the US timber industry and is appealing to US corporations and government agencies to pay for shipping lumber to Indonesia, the groups said. In order to convince donors that the project will be effective, it will start with a pilot shipment of 50 containers of timber, enough to build 800 to 1,200 single-family wood-and-brick dwellings, the groups said. World Wildlife Fund spokesman Michael Ross said the Indonesian government had sought environmentally sustainable ways of rebuilding Aceh after observing that tsunami damage was worst in deforested parts of the province. "If we can't supply at least some of that timber with renewable wood from abroad, we are going to lose the forests of Sumatra," Ross said.

 

 

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE