Corruption threatens Indonesian forests

Corruption threatens Indonesian forests

Frank Brandmaier, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Jakarta/Singapore

In the end the herd could take no more. Driven by hunger, the 13 wild elephants lost their fear of people and went on the rampage in two villages in northern Sumatra, trampling everything and anything that came in their path.

Dozens of villagers fled, but a tame elephant didn't survive the attack. Once their home was in the neighboring Gunung Leuser National Park, where they had plenty to eat. Park Director Awriya Ibrahim is not surprised at the animals' behavior: "Illegal logging is forcing them out of the area".

For some time already conservationists have been sounding alarm bells. The latest studies only go to show that logging in Indonesia has reached record proportions.

In the '80s, the sprawling archipelago was losing about a million hectares a year. Three environmental agencies have now discovered that the forest being lost amounts to double that - half the size of Switzerland every year.

"Logging on this scale and at this speed is unparalleled," says co-authoress Emily Matthews. Forty years ago, 162 million hectares of primeval forest covered Indonesia. By the turn of the century, the figure had dropped to just 98 million. The insatiable appetite of the powerful plywood and pulp industry for logs has seen the share of illegally logged forest shoot up to 65 percent of all timber production.

If the forest does not fall prey to the chainsaw, it is threatened by man-made fire -- with dire consequences. Authorities in Sumatra were recently forced to supply thousands of breathing masks to residents in the neighboring province of Riau after smoke from forest fires had become a serious health hazard.

And if the stock of timber does not go in smoke, new plantations and logging operations will continue to whittle it down at the same rate, warns the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). It predicts that, if these practices continue, Sumatra's low-lying forests will have disappeared by 2004 "That would be a hard-hitting and irretrievable loss of species variety," insist the environmentalists.

In their survey, three organizations - World Resource Institute, Global Forest Watch and Forest Watch Indonesia - make it clear that the annual rate of forest erosion could scarcely have doubled if a corrupt political and economic system had not provided the breeding ground for it to flourish. "Irregular dealings in the forest sector give the logging companies a free hand without having to worry about long-term sustainability," say the organizations.

The logging licenses were generally awarded back in the days of ex-president Soeharto. And, as was the custom then, the favored few were mostly relatives and political friends. Today, just ten firms hold almost half of all concessions. Yet with Soeharto's ousting in 1998, any pretence that illegal logging was being controlled was finally lost. The economic turbulence during the Asia crisis of 1997/98 took care of the rest.

Experts are not surprised that timber theft and clearances even in the national parks of Sulawesi, Borneo and Sumatra continues to increase unabated.

"Indonesia is rapidly turning from a forest-rich to a forest- poor country," warns environmental expert Emily Matthews.

All is not yet lost, though: the variety of species in relation to surface area is still relatively high comparative to surface area, found the study. However, even international pressure from donor countries has so far failed to avert the looming dangers.