In official and scholarly circles in the United States it has become almost a cliché to say that no country is both more important and less well known to Americans than Indonesia. Southeast Asia Forum director Donald K. Emmerson would like to change this by making Indonesia better known, among Americans generally and at Stanford especially. On September 19 he met in Jakarta with 18 locally resident Stanford alumni to discuss ideas for improving international awareness of, and expertise on, their country. Melinda Wiria (MS '98) coordinated the visit.

Following the resignation of Indonesia's authoritarian president Soeharto in 1998, the country underwent an extraordinary political transformation. Since 2006 Indonesia has been ranked by Freedom House as the only "free" country in Southeast Asia. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) has proudly promoted his homeland's status as the third largest democracy, after India and the United States, and the largest Muslim-majority democracy as well.

In recognition of this achievement, the World Movement for Democracy chose to hold its Sixth Assembly in Indonesia. In April 2010, SEAF director Donald K. Emmerson traveled to Jakarta to attend the event and to arrange interviews with local political figures for a documentary film on democracy in developing countries. Also involved in the filming were Larry Diamond and Hicham Ben Abdallah, respectively the director of and a visiting scholar at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

One of the Indonesian interviewees was SBY himself, pictured above at the presidential palace with his wife Kristiani Herawati and Prof. Emmerson on the day of the filming. The president took the occasion very seriously, carefully preparing his answers and conveying them clearly in fluent English. The film will also feature Malaysia's experience with democracy, including the travails of opposition politician Anwar Ibrahim. 

The documentary's producer, Appleseed Entertainment, hopes to release it in 2011-12.

The United States and the ASEAN group of nations have further strengthened political, economic and security ties, after their second full-scale summit in New York.

President Barack Obama said the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which groups ten countries, had the potential for true world leadership. President Obama also made it clear that he saw Asia as a vital plank of US foreign policy.

DR EMMERSON: In the run-up to the summit, there was a big question. Would the partnership be declared as being strategic in nature? That was a key word in the discussion and what happened was the leaders basically finessed the issue. It's not hard to suspect that they worried that if they declared a strategic partnership with the United States, this would cause alarm in Beijing. Because let's remember in the run-up to this summit, we've had a lot of activity - the split between China and Japan over the disputed islands, one could continue with some evidence of a more muscular Chinese foreign policy, its commitment to its claim to possess basically the entire South China Sea, escalating that to the level of a core interest, presumably equivalent to their interest in recovering Taiwan. I could go on, but in many case, it was understandable that the subtext of the meeting was what will China think? So basically what the summit did was to finesse the issue. They decided to pass on the question of raising the partnership to quote - a strategic level - unquote, to the ASEAN US Eminent Persons Group, presumably expert advisors that would be convened and would make recommendations down the road.

And one of the most remarkable things about the statement was how much ground it covered. I mean, among the topics and issues that the leaders committed themselves to do something about, were 14 as I count them, 14 different subjects. Human rights, educational change, trade and investment, science, technology, climate change, interfaith dialogue, disaster management, illicit trafficking, international terrorism, I could go on. So it is clear to me that one of the tasks that ASEAN and the US will have to face in the coming months, is to try to insert some sense of priority.

LAM: On that issue of priority, the US President, Barack Obama, of course, postponed a couple of visits to Indonesia due to pressing domestic demands. Did he in anyway express American commitment to the ASEAN region?

DR EMMERSON: Yes, this was particularly kind of, I suppose you could say, evident in the fact that the meeting occurred at all, finally it was organized. It lasted two hours. He was apparently quite engaged and engaging during that period of time. And I think there is no question that the United States under his administration is committed to South East Asia as a region, indeed has agreed with the leaders of ASEAN, that ASEAN should play a central role in the process of building regional cooperation in East Asia.

LAM: And, of course, one of the topics that came up as well was the South China Sea, that entire region, given the competing maritime and territorial claims vis-à-vis the Spratley and Paracel Island groups. Do you think China is watching the US relationship with ASEAN, this growing relationship - do you think Beijing might be watching it with unease?

DR EMMERSON: Yes, absolutely. I am confident that they are watching it with considerable unease and I note that the statement that the leaders made, made no reference whatsoever to the South China Sea, presumably because of sensitivity with regard to Beijing's possible reaction. The topic was implicitly mentioned, but not explicitly.

LAM: And what about within ASEAN, the grouping itself? The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, on the weekend said that the ASEAN nations' credibility might suffer if they did not take a tougher line with Burma and this is in view of the upcoming elections in November. This is presumably directed at specifically China and India, but it could also be referenced to ASEAN could it not, because Burma is a member of ASEAN. Do you see that changing anytime soon with ASEAN, that ASEAN countries, leading members like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, that they might take a stronger stand with the military junta in Rangoon?

DR EMMERSON: The election in Myanmar, if I can call it an election, since it will be highly compromised and manipulated will take place, at least is scheduled to take place November 7th. Indonesia does not take over the chairmanship of ASEAN until the 1st January. So the question is, since Indonesia is a democratic country, arguably, the most democratic of any country in South East Asia, will it use its opportunity to try to put pressure on Burma in the year 2011? My own view is that ASEAN will probably not fulfill Ban Ki-moon's hope, will not exercise significant pressure on the junta. Instead, we could get the opposite situation in which so long as there is not major violence associated with the election, it will essentially be received by ASEAN as a kind of minimally-acceptable basis for assuring the Burmese junta that ASEAN still treats them as a full member. In other words, it's quite possible that the junta may get away with what I take to be a kind of facade effort to legitimate their rule.

Global agricultural expansion cut a wide swath through tropical forests during the 1980s and 1990s. More than half a million square miles of new farmland - an area roughly the size of Alaska - was created in the developing world between 1980 and 2000, of which over 80 percent was carved out of tropical forests, according to Stanford researcher Holly Gibbs.

"This has huge implications for global warming, if we continue to expand our farmland into tropical forests at that rate," said Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Earth System Science and in the Program on Food Security and the Environment, who led the study.

Gibbs and colleagues at several other universities analyzed Landsat satellite data and images from the United Nations to reach their conclusions. Theirs is the first study to map and quantify what types of land have been replaced by the immense area of new farmland developed across the tropical forest belt during the 1980s and 1990s.

While this huge increase was happening within the tropics, agricultural land in the non-tropical countries actually decreased in area.

The study was published this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that to keep pace with increasing demand, global agricultural production will have to keep increasing, possibly even doubling by 2050. That would likely lead to millions of additional acres of tropical forest being felled over the next 40 years.

Direct impact on carbon released into atmosphere

"Every million acres of forest that is cut releases the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as 40 million cars do in a year," Gibbs said.

Most of the carbon released comes from burning the forests, but even if the trees are simply cast aside, the bulk of the carbon from the plants makes its way into the atmosphere during decomposition, she said.

Gibbs and her colleagues found that about 55 percent of the tropical forests that had been cut between 1980 and 2000 were intact forests and another 28 percent were forests that had experienced some degradation, such as some small-scale farming, logging or gathering of wood and brush for cooking or heating fuel.

"The tropical forests store more than 340 billion tons of carbon, which is 40 times the total current worldwide annual fossil fuel emissions," Gibbs said. "If we continue cutting down these forests, there is a huge potential to further contribute to climate change."

The increasing demand for agricultural production stems in part from the ever-growing number of people on the planet, who all want to eat. Additionally, members of the growing middle class in emerging economies such as China and India are showing interest in eating more meat, which further intensifies demand. And incentives to grow crops for biofuel production have increased.

But Gibbs and her colleagues also observed some encouraging signs. The patterns of change in the locations they analyzed made it clear that during the 1990s, less of the deforestation was done by small family farms than was the case in the 1980s and more was done by large, corporate-run farms. Big agribusiness tends to be more responsive to global economic signals as well as pressure campaigns from advocacy organizations and consumer groups than individual small farmers.

In Brazil, where a pattern had developed of expanding soy production by direct forest clearing and by pushing cattle ranching off pastureland and into forested areas, a campaign by Greenpeace and others resulted in agreements by key companies to rein in their expansion. Instead, they worked to increase production on land already in agricultural use.

'Seeing positive changes'

"These farmers effectively increased the yield of soy on existing lands and they have also increased the head of cattle per acre by a factor of five or six," Gibbs said. "It is exciting that we are starting to see how responsive industry can be to consumer demands. We really are seeing positive changes in this area."

Along with wiser use of land already cleared, Gibbs said, improvements in technology and advances in yield intensification also could slow the expansion of farming into the forests.

Other studies that analyzed land use changes between 2000 and 2007 have shown that the pace of cutting down the tropical forests has begun to slow in some regions.

But as long as the human population on the planet continues to grow, the pressure to put food on the table, feed in the barnyard and fuel in the gas tank will continue to grow, too.

"It is critical that we focus our efforts on reducing rates of deforestation while at the same time restoring degraded lands and improving land management across the tropics," Gibbs said. "The good news is that pressure from consumer groups and nongovernmental organizations combined with international climate agreements could provide a real opportunity to shift the tide in favor of forest conservation rather than farmland expansion."

In addition to her position at the Department of Environmental Earth System Science and the Program on Food Security and the Environment, Gibbs is affiliated with Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. Jon Foley, a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior, and director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, was Gibbs' PhD adviser when the research was begun. He is a coauthor of the paper.

Initial funding for the project was provided by NASA. Gibbs is currently funded by a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellowship.