With the lifestyle of more and more people going fashionable and economy minting out of furniture industries, the demand for the rare merbau is soaring to a destructive level – i.e. pushing the rare tropical hardwood to the brink of extinction from the planet.
Once common in Asia and eastern Africa, 83 percent of the Papua and Papua New Guinea forests in Indonesia containing merbau have already fallen victim to logging or are earmarked for logging, as per the Greenpeace findings.
The significant amount of the forest that remains untouched is an alarming 17 percent!
It requires the regulating authorities to crack down on the species’ exports immediately. The environmental activists concerned on the lines of the species’ wiping out urged the Indonesian government to act today.
In a press conference, Greenpeace campaigner Hapsoro said,
The Indonesian government should set up an international control mechanism to protect the species from extinction.
But, will the political and economic pressures by the big guns let this scanty part of the rare merbau survive in the wild?
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