Concerned Balinese act to protect vanishing forest

Concerned Balinese act to protect vanishing forest

By I Wayan Juniartha

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): Nyoman Suweta remembers that night
clearly. A full enchanting moon beautified the clear sky,
radiating an aura of serenity. Yet, his village was far from
serene. A distant yet distinctly clear buzzing sound incessantly
violated the night's silence, dragging the villagers out of their
peaceful slumber.

"It was like the sound of thousands of bees, but we knew it
wasn't. This sound had a mechanical quality to it, monotonous,
rude and demanding," he recalled.

It later turned out that it was in fact the sound of
chainsaws, dozens of them, busily cutting down precious majegau
(Dysoxylum caulostachyum) trees in the forest surrounding the
village.

Majegau is a special tree for Balinese people. The tree
produces a faint refreshing and distinctive fragrance. The older
the tree, the stronger the fragrance. The Balinese classify
majegau as kayu dewa (divine trees), meaning they can only be
used in sacred buildings such as temples and shrines. Balinese
are not allowed to use kayu dewa in the so-called profane
buildings, such as houses or offices.

There were around 70 hectares of forest, mostly containing
majegau trees, surrounding the desa adat (traditional/customary
village) of Catur, some 70 kilometers east of here. For the past
several years, the forest has been gradually destroyed by illegal
logging activities.

The loggers come to the forest with mechanical chainsaws, cut
the trees down indiscriminately and load them onto trucks before
leaving the forest as if nothing had happened.

The villagers can only stand back and watch the destruction of
their forest with dismay. They resent the illegal logging, but
there is nothing they can do. Nyoman Suweta, who is the chief of
Catur, said that his fellow villagers were very frustrated.

"We want to do something, but the forest is not in our
jurisdiction. The government had designated the forest as a
state-owned forest, so there is nothing we can do. Once upon a
time, the forest belonged to the village and the villagers were
obliged to protect and conserve it. Now, the responsibility has
been passed on to the police and the ministry of forestry, but
you can see for yourself how rampant the illegal logging is,"
Suweta said.

With the coming of the reform era and the Bali
administration's initiative of empowering traditional community
organizations, Suweta found solid grounds for regaining the
rights his village once held.

"Now we are in the process of approaching other traditional
villages, so that eventually in each village's Awig awig
(traditional law), there will be an article on the eradication of
illegal logging," Suweta said.

Those "joint" Awig awig would also make it easier for a desa
adat to prosecute and punish illegal loggers that come from other
desa adat.

"The government would give this initiative a huge boost if
they gave the rights to manage the forests back to the desa
adat," Suweta said.

Concern over traditional communities' and indigenous people's
rights over the forest are not just Suweta's. Several
environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that gathered
here on the eve of the three-day East Asia Ministerial Conference
voiced a similar concern.

Longgena Ginting of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment
(Walhi) stressed that traditional communities and indigenous
people's rights were among Walhi's top priorities in its efforts
to conserve Indonesia's endangered tropical forests.

"Unless the government and the timber industry sincerely
respect the traditional communities' and indigenous people's
rights, the forest conservation effort is likely to be futile.
These traditional communities and indigenous people possess the
knowledge, which we lack, on how to be friends with the forest.
How to utilize the forest without damaging it," Ginting said.

Another top priority, according to Ginting, was undoubtedly
the implementation of a moratorium, resulting in all industrial-
scale logging activities being put on hold for a certain period
of time.

The moratorium would give the government all the time it
needed to rehabilitate the forest, restructure the timber
industry and trade, and empower local traditional communities.

"Up to now, Indonesia has lost 72 percent of its natural
forest. Furthermore, the deforestation rate has reached 2.4
million hectares per year. Illegal logging activities have robbed
56.6 million cubic meters of trees from our forests each year,
not to mention the ten million hectares we lost due to the forest
fire in 1997/1998," Ginting said.

Illegal logging is not only damaging from the environmental
point of view, but also economically. The World Bank's Country
Director for Indonesia, Mark Baird, disclosed that illegal
logging inflicted a staggering US$600 million per year in losses
to the government of Indonesia. The figure was more than twice
what the government spent on its subsidized food program for the
poor in 2001.

"Unless the government acts quickly and strongly against
illegal logging activities, and puts a moratorium into action,
Indonesia will lose all of its forests in the next 15 years,"
Ginting stressed.