Decentralization reforms in Indonesia have led to local communities negotiating logging agreements with timber companies for relatively low financial payoffs and at high environmental cost. This paper analyzes the potential of payments for environmental services (PES) to provide an alternative to logging for these communities and to induce forest conservation.

This report deals with the serious conflicts that occur between humans and wildlife. In today

Oil palm is one of the world's most rapidly expanding equatorial crops. The two largest oil palm-producing countries

A three-year-old Indonesian boy who died last week had bird flu, a health ministry official confirmed Wednesday, bringing the toll to 108 in the country worst hit by the disease. The child, from a village in Wonogiri in Central Java, died at a state hospital in nearby Solo city on April 23, health ministry spokeswoman Lili Sulistyawati said. "The results of two tests on the patient's samples showed that he was infected with the H5N1 virus," Sulistyawati said. Two positive test results are needed before Indonesian authorities confirm a bird flu infection.

It is rather unusual, if not unimaginable, to expect the world's mightiest and the richest nation face the prospect of isolation. Yet that is what the United States of America, the sole super power of the world, faced at the two-week conference on climate in the holiday island of Bali in mid-December. The fear of becoming a pariah nation forced the US delegation at Bali to fall in line with the wishes of the majority of the 190 nations that had assembled in the hope of preparing the roadmap for a new climate treaty after the Kyoto protocol ends in 2012.

The Asian Development Bank on Tuesday criticised rice export bans, saying governments should instead resort to fiscal measures to help the poor, as prices of the staple continued to climb. While Indonesia promised more support to its farmers to encourage them to sell their produce to the government, signs China may extend rice exports this year came as a relief for the market scrambling for cargoes after bans by India and Vietnam.

Developing countries are fighting hard to retain the right to increase farm im-port tariffs in spite of slashing them rapidly to cope with the global food crisis. Faint signs of progress in the troubled "Doha round" of global trade talks last week in Geneva were imperilled by a fresh dispute over poor countries' ability to protect their farmers with tariffs.

Indonesian authorities have raised the alert level for a volcano near the country's third largest city following increased volcanic activity, a volcanology centre official said on Thursday. More than 100 volcanic tremors were recorded from Mount Papandayan in West Java on Wednesday, although there were no visible signs it would erupt soon, said Estu Kriswati from the volcanology centre in the nearby city of Bandung. "The volcano has shown increased activity since April 9 but it reached its peak yesterday," she said.

DENILIQUIN, Australia: Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. "It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety," he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, "and now it has stopped." The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to satisfy the daily needs of 20 million people. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia's rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.

About 600 people have been evacuated in eastern Indonesia after a volcano began spewing ash, a vulcanologist said on Wednesday. Mount Egon on Flores Island started to erupt late on Tuesday, emitting grey ash up to 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) above the crater, said Muhammad Hendrasto, head of monitoring at the volcanology office in Bandung on Java island. Authorities immediately raised the alert to orange, one notch below the highest level, and evacuated people living about 1.8 km (1 mile) from the peak of the volcano, he said.

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