Community-based national park to curb illegal logging in Sumatra
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
President Megawati Soekarnoputri is scheduled on Friday to inaugurate the Batang Gadis National Park, Mandailing Natal regency, North Sumatra, a model community-based park that exemplifies the government's efforts to curb illegal logging.
Jatna Supriyatna, the regional vice president of Conservation International (CI) Indonesia, said Batang Gadis was a bottom-up national park, because it had the full support of Mandialing residents, who had requested it be established.
He said the request was triggered primarily by the trauma following the flooding at Bukit Lawang resort in the neighboring regency, Langkat, in November 2003, which killed over 140 people.
The local government accepted a demand from 30,000 people living along the banks of the Batang Gadis River, who went to the regent's office after the disaster to ask for the designation of 108,000 hectares of forest near the river as a national park, Jatna said.
Many environmentalists and the local administration have blamed the natural disaster in Langkat on illegal logging in Mount Leuser National Park.
"In many cases, the illegal logging in conservation areas or national parks occurred because the local administration didn't allow residents to benefit from the areas," Jatna said on the sidelines of a presentation on the biodiversity of Batang Gadis at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) recently.
Data from the Ministry of Forestry in 2003 shows that about 43 million hectares of a total of 120.3 million hectares of forest have lost productivity due to illegal forest exploitation, with the forest degradation rate at more than 2 million hectares per year.
Jatna said that the management of the national park would improve the prosperity of residents by developing agroforestry for coffee, silkworm breeding and other agricultural products.
"We have already established cooperation with the international Starbucks chain. The company will buy Arabica Mandialing coffee from residents at premium prices, especially if it is organic (cultivated without using pesticides or chemical fertilizers).
According to a biodiversity survey carried out from Feb. 2 to March 20, Batang Gadis park has 228 different types of flora per 0.2 hectare of land -- richer than the Amazon forest in South America, which has fewer than 200.
The survey team also discovered a new type of Rafflesia"? flower, the padma. The flower is currently being studied by experts at the LIPI Biology Research Center.