The King of the Swingers could soon find himself with nowhere to swing. Orang-utan homes may be wiped off the face of the earth within 10 years, as illegal logging demolishes rainforests in south-east Asia 30 per cent faster than previously feared, the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) revealed yesterday.

"The rate of decline of the forests is the most alarming we have seen yet anywhere in the world," said Christian Nellemann, who helped write the UN reportLast Stand of the Orang-utan. "Suitable forest habitat may be gone in as little as a decade." The apes once ranged across south-east Asia, but there are only about 7,000 Sumatran and 45,000 Bornean orang-utans in the wild. With orang-utans breeding only once every seven years, their numbers could struggle to recover.

A voracious market for Indonesian timber, coupled with other forests being cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, means that the orang-utans' natural habitat is shrinking. "New satellite imagery reveals that the illegal logging is now entering a new critical phase with the rainforests of south-east Asia disappearing 30 per cent faster than had previously been supposed," the report says.

It says that 2.1 million hectares are being cleared every year. That is a line of several hundred thousand trucks stretching from Paris to Bangkok, loaded with timber - a year's illegal logging is estimated to be worth £2bn. Indonesian authoritieshave seized 3,000 truckloads of timber and arrested six people in recent weeks.

But this is a drop in the ocean, or forest, with illegal logging going on in all but four of the 41 national parks. Achim Steiner, Unep's executive director, said: "Indonesia requires resources from the international community ... including the wardens on the ground." UN officials estimate that 88 per cent of Indonesian timber has been felled illegally.
(By Claire Soares, The Independent, 12/06/2007)