. The Conservation Atlas of Tropical Forests: Asia and the Pacific. Indonesia. Logged-mer and heavily degraded foresi on Ohi Island m ihe Lesser Sundas, Indonesia. D. Laurent Irian Java • Irian Java, the eastern-most province of Indonesia, shares a common 736 km long border with Papua New Guinea. • The freshwater swamp forests include huge stands of native sago palm, managed and utilised as their staple food by the indigenous people. • The mangrove forests are second in extent only to those of the Sundarbans forest of India and Bangladesh. They have recently come under threat of exploitation,
. The Conservation Atlas of Tropical Forests: Asia and the Pacific. Indonesia. Logged-mer and heavily degraded foresi on Ohi Island m ihe Lesser Sundas, Indonesia. D. Laurent Irian Java • Irian Java, the eastern-most province of Indonesia, shares a common 736 km long border with Papua New Guinea. • The freshwater swamp forests include huge stands of native sago palm, managed and utilised as their staple food by the indigenous people. • The mangrove forests are second in extent only to those of the Sundarbans forest of India and Bangladesh. They have recently come under threat of exploitation, and possible destruction, to provide wood chips (Petocz, 1985). • About 86 per cent (354,360 sq. km)of Irian Jaya remains forested and relatively undisturbed, because the population is low and con- centrated mainly in some parts of the mountains. • Extensive logging concessions have now been granted and there are plans for substantial transmigration schemes. Deforestation The annual rate of deforestation in Indonesia was estimated at 5500 sq. km per year for the years 1976-80, and 6000 sq. km per year for 1981-5. More recently rates of 7000 sq. km per year have been quoted (Repetto, 1988), but 11,000 sq. km per year (Gillis, 1988) and even 12,000 sq. km per year (Myers, 1989) have been feared. Such deforestation rates place Indonesia second in the world only to Brazil. Despite the high rate of deforestation in the Indonesian archipelago, however, tropical rain forests still occur extensively on all the large islands. Nevertheless, the area of the original vegetation cover has been considerably reduced, and much of the remaining forest has been seriously disturbed by logging and shifting agriculture. Agricultural settlement Traditional swidden agriculture within large expanses of rain forest is relatively harmless, in contrast to small- holder agricultural settlement, which gradually makes inroads at the forest margins. Where the latter is unplanned, it has become a ma
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