Battered Southeast Asia faces uphill battle saving its forests

Battered Southeast Asia faces uphill battle saving its forests

Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Jakarta

Southeast Asia wasn't winning any medals for forestry preservation back when the region's economy was booming. After five years of economic doldrums, the toss-up between quick bucks off trees or sustainable development hasn't gotten easier for regional governments.

Indonesia serves as a good example. Two of its most promising export industries - palm oil and pulp - threaten to hasten the demise of the sprawling archipelago's fast-disappearing forests.

Global demand for palm oil is expected to nearly double from 22.5 million tons a year now to 40 million tons in 2020, and to meet that demand Indonesia is likely to increase its palm oil plantations by 3 million hectares, probably on what is now forest land, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Indonesia's pulp and paper industry poses an even greater threat to the country's forests, which have been disappearing at an alarming rate of 2 million hectares each year since 1997.

A score of giant pulp mills, including the world's two largest, are located in Sumatra, the legacy of former president Suharto's corruption-tainted policy of passing out huge concessions of forest land to timber tycoons who were supposed to replant fast-growing trees as part of the deal.

The tendency was to clear cut the trees on their concessions and then buy illegally-cut timber for their mills from nearby national parks, neglecting the expensive and time-consuming process of replanting.

Although many of the pulp giants were hit by the 1997 financial crisis and should be bankrupt, the government has declared the sector a priority industry, and will probably restructure their debt early next year and even allow them to expand to generate more employment and export earnings.

"We're seeing a potential collision between one set of public objectives and another one, and one of them is short term and very pressing and the other one is long term, and easily left to the next government," said Thomas Walton, the World Bank's chief environmentalist in Indonesia.

With an estimated 40-45 million people unemployed or underemployed in Indonesia, the government is not likely to close down pulp mills or prevent palm oil planting this year for the sake of the forests.

Cambodia is another country that has launched shady timber concessions and now faces growing pressure from environmentalists to cancel them.

In 1999, the 13 logging concessionaires agreed to draw up 25- year logging plans along with environmental and social impact assessments.

When they failed to meet the 2001 deadline, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen slapped a moratorium on all logging in the country until the assessments were completed and had received government approval.

Although the companies finally presented their impact reports and logging plans in mid-November last year, they allowed only a meager 19-day period given to community members to review them, prompting environmentalists to cry foul.

Laos, whose main national resources include trees and hydro- power, is in danger of losing the latter to massive illegal logging in its northeastern hinterland.

Donors have been pressuring the country to stop the rape of its own forests, which threaten its watersheds and hydro-electric potential, but the lure of fast money in one of the world's poorest countries is a daunting obstacle.

Thailand and the Philippines don't have much forest land left to rape.

A century ago, more than 85 percent of Thailand's approximately 500,000 square kilometer area was covered in thick tropical forests.

That figure was reduced to about 53 percent by 1962 and to only 29.4 percent by 1985, according to Forestry Department statistics.

Reacting to the accelerating pace of forest destruction, the government outlawed commercial logging in 1985, but population pressure from Thailand's approximately 75,000 villages has nibbled away at the remaining forests and today only about 25 percent of the country is covered in natural forest, most of it within about 100 national parks.

In the Philippines, according to the latest data from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), as of 1996, only 5.493 million hectares of the country's 15 million hectares of "forest areas" have actual forest cover.

Antonio Carandang, a DENR community-based forest management specialist, said deforestation has slowed in the country because the remaining forest lands were in hard-to-reach areas.

"Most of our remaining virgin forest covers are high up in the mountains surrounded by treacherous terrains," he said. "So we can say they have natural protection from unwanted intruders."

Carandang said that now illegal logging activities were mainly done in secondary growth areas or former timberlands which were already abandoned by concessionaires.

"If you just leave these overlogged areas untouched, the forest will regenerate by themselves. Unfortunately, since these areas were already abandoned and there's a road network to these places, illegal loggers taken advantage of them," Carandang said.

He added that the Philippines' galloping population growth put a lot of pressure on the forests, especially the secondary forests.