Chainsaw buster

It is a sign of just how powerless the environment minister feels when he says the best way to stop Indonesia's rampant illegal logging is to literally spike the forests. That is, pound one-metre long ceramic spikes into the base of trees. If the trees are cut, the spikes break loggers' chainsaws and sometimes injures the logger as well. The spikes can also be put into upper parts of the tree, so they will break the sawmill blades if the tree is milled.

Spiking trees is banned in the United States, where the practice was used by activists to stop logging in both protected forests and in areas where logging was permitted.

But the frustrated minister, Nabiel Makarim, says using human resources for the job has proven to be useless. National park rangers, police and military patrols are too corrupt to stop gangs of loggers destroying national parks and protected forests.

Indonesia's forests are disappearing at a rate of 3.8 million hectares per year, with national parks such as Tanjung Puting, home to the last of Indonesia's orangutans, rapidly being chewed up by the loggers' saws.

The environment ministry has prosecuted a few illegal loggers in Java, but they were given ridiculously short sentences, says Mr Nabiel. And when they appealed to one of Indonesia's famously corrupt higher courts, they were given even shorter sentences.

Spikes have deterred loggers in the Sungai Wain Protection Forest in East Kalimantan, say environmentalists. Before spiking, several major operations to catch the loggers failed because they were always tipped off by enforcement agencies. But since local municipal officials agreed to introduce spikes in 2001, the loggers have moved on.