The world's largest deforestation project in Indonesia

The government and a group of private companies aim to raze an area of ​​forest in Indonesia 112 times the size of Washington.

Hundreds of diggers have been deployed on an island in theIndonesia, like a firing squad.Their goal is to execute the greatest project of deforestation currently underway around the world. A simply gigantic area, which extends over a surface equal to 112 times that of Washington, the capital of the United States, Washington, will in fact be deforested.

“This is how we solve the food and climate crises”

The surprising initiative was started in the province of Papua, located on the Indonesian ocean island of New Guinea (the other part of the territory, to the east, is owned by the state of Papua New Guinea).A considered area pristine – far from large population centers such as Jakarta – and which not surprisingly hosts some of the last large tropical forests of the Asia-Pacific macro-region, very rich in biodiversity.Nonetheless the government – ​​agrees with a group of private companies, which includes well-known names such as Danone, Barry Callebaut, Mondalez and Kellogg – decided to cut down the trees to make room for rice crops and sugar cane.

The latter will be at least partly destined for the production of biofuels.Together with rice, the government assures that it will be possible to "resolve the global food and climate crises".Furthermore, Indonesia, which is currently the world's largest importer of sugar, aims to become self-sufficient by 2027.

According to NGOs, the project will cause emissions of one billion tons of CO2

Motivations that did not appear convincing in the eyes of the non-governmental organizations Indonesian ecologists:“This is very bad news, because this project puts people at risk climate objectives of Indonesia, eliminating the efforts conducted over the last five years to reduce deforestation linked to the production of palm oil, rubber and paper”, he explained to the French newspaper Novethic Amanda Hurowitz, head of air Asia at Mighty Earth.According to the associations, the execution of the project could cause the dispersion into the atmosphere of approximately one billion tons of CO2.

Indonesia has already lost around 25 percent of its forest areas since 1990, and the objective has always been to make room for crops (especially palm oil) or mining projects.These are disturbing data, considering that the forest of the Asian nation is considered the third "lung" of the Earth, after Amazon and pelvis Congo.