European furniture using timber from razed orang-utan jungle

Berlin (dpa) – Investigators trawling a "trove" of paperwork have found that European furniture companies are likely contributing to the ruination of orang-utan habitat by importing supplies cut from Borneo's forests. "Hardwood products on sale in Europe come from the biggest users of deforestation timber in Indonesia," according to UK-based Earthsight, which describes itself as an "investigative NGO," and Indonesian counterpart Auriga Nusantara. The duo carried out the research using around 10,000 “unpublished government documents” through which they identified around 65 factories and mills in Indonesia. Export records show companies export their timber to the member states of the European Union, they say. The Indonesia-based investigators described visited four regions of "recently flattened" jungle from which the top five producers on their list operated last year – a quintet that in turn sold 23,272 cubic metres of plywood, garden decking and door frames, made of tree species only found in natural forests, mostly to firms in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and based in part on false claims of the timber being "sustainably" sourced. The team say they "found thousands of hectares of newly cleared land in central Borneo that, just a few years ago, made up a large part of one of the last remaining orang-utan forest strongholds left in the world." The Auriga Nusantara team described residents as telling them of feeling like "just a spectator" as they watched the razing of jungle. "Orang-utans being driven out, indigenous peoples and local communities losing their space" says Hilman Afif of Auriga Nusantara, who described the destruction of Borneo’s forests as "not only an Indonesian tragedy, but also global." The following information is not intended for publication dpa spr arw

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