I've not been to Riau, but have been to other parts  of Sumatra and Borneo (Kalimantan) where the orangutans live.  We saw lots of evidence of logging well inside the national park boundaries that were supposedly off-limits to loggers, and were told by locals that the local park rangers could always be bought off to let the loggers in for a night or two before heading back out.  At which point the forest is pretty well shot.  (The soils there are actually pretty lousy, rain-forest notwithstanding, and all the nutrients are trapped by the tree-roots.  Cut down the trees and you very quickly get sand and desert.)

Bottom line is that the news from the Indonesian gov't is great - let's make sure it translates into equally great actions.

...I agree with Sean's assessment on this.  While the concept itself is excellent, how does Indonesia plan to actually enforce the moratorium?

Are they diverting any additional manpower, energy, money, or resources, to step up enforcement?  Current enforcement is lax, and that was with some logging allowed, so how bad will it be with no logging allowed?  Do they have the resources to cover such an area?

Glenn,

As the Greenpeace media director, it's important that you know this fact.  Tropical rainforests evolved over the past 200 million years and the nutrients were sucked up by the vegetation long ago.  (The tropics were not subject to the ice ages, so the plants have been growing constantly, giving the land no respite from their sucking of nutrients from it.)  Plants in tropical rainforests grow out of other plants, not out of the soil poor ground.  Once the rainforest is cut, it won't grow back.

That should read "nutrient poor ground," not "soil poor ground."

I just got back from 5 mo of volunteering in Indonesia with the Sumatran Orangutan Society and the problem with palm oil is complex but urgently in need of a solution if orangutans are to survive the next decade. I disagree that a ban on palm oil is needed as this will affect the workers in the field drastically. We need a consumer campaign to alert people to the number of products that contain palm oil and then a followup campaign to accept only palm oil sustainably grown.Body Shop by the way switched to using Columbian sustainably produced palm oil.
The corruption in Indonesia will also need to be solved before any lasting bans on forest destruction work & who really knows how to do that? Another solution is eco-tourism development as Indonesia has the highest number of endangered species. Currently it only cost $2 to go see semi-wild rehabilitated orangutans in the wild...lots of room for development to support local people. Interested in a list of products that contain palm oil? Got to ran.org.

And if we only buy palm oil from Columbia, the Indonesian workers will still be impacted.  Sorry, but if you make your living destroying the Earth, you're not entitled to consideration from those of us trying to protect ecosystems and species.  The priority is to protect what little is left of the rainforests, which are more valuable than the entire human race.  Impacts to workers are a secondary consideration.