AN EXAMPLE OF INCREASED DEMAND

BANGSRI, Indonesia - The last of central Java's great teakwood forests ends up in a place like Abdul Jambari's garden furniture workshop , a place filled with the whine of buzz saws and the burr of electric sanders. "This is for export," Jambari says, stroking the finely polished arm of an auburn-grained folding chair. "It's the best teak, what we call class A." Because his order book is full, a month or two from now, for about $100, Jambari's chair will sit on a patio or deck somewhere in the United States or Europe.

A LOG scavenger saws a stump in a dirt field, all that remains of a stripped teak forest in Bangsri, in central Java.

That chair and the 4,000 others that are part of Jambari's latest export shipment, have left behind a swath of utter devastation, one of thousands that afflict this archipelago and spell the end of the majestic forests that once blanketed Indonesia. Their disappearance also means the extinction of innumerable animal and plant species indigenous to the country.

The tropical forests of Indonesia (one-tenth of the world's total) have fallen victim to the virtual collapse of political authority in this Southeast Asian nation of 1,000 islands and more than 200 million people, the fourth-largest population in the world. The toppling of the regime of President Subarto, a close U.S. ally, whose three-decade rule often ruthlessly imposed order, has been followed by widespread violent upheaval, including multiple secessionist movements. In this chaotic atmosphere, illegal logging has gone unchecked.

In an unpublished report, the World Bank predicted that all the lowland forests in one of Indonesia's largest islands, Sumatra, would be extinct before 2005 and in Kalimantan, the island formerly known as Borneo, by 2010. Sadly these predictions have proven to be only accurate. Swamp forests will disappear within five years. In the past decade, the rate of Indonesia's deforestation has accelerated from 2.47 million acres annually to 4.2 million acres.

Based on an analysis of satellite photos of Indonesia's forests, the report contends that unless the government acts immediately to stop rampant illegal logging, "the only extensive forests that will remain in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Selawesi, in the second decade of the new millennium, will be the low-stature forests of the mountains."

by Edward A. Gargan, Newsday