Few signs of cutting back on damage
Few signs of cutting back on damage
John Vidal, Guardian News Service, London
Late last year more than 200 people were killed and 400 houses
destroyed when hundreds of illegally felled trees in the Leuser
national park in northern Sumatra crashed down a mountain side,
smashing their way into the town of Gunung Leuser.
The "natural" disaster was a direct result of the rampant
illegal forestry in the national park, which can expect to have
few trees left within a few years. The situation is so serious
that the UN fears most of Indonesia will be treeless within a
generation.
Every month several ships loaded with thousands of tonnes of
the cheap Indonesian plywood and timber arrive in European ports.
Governments and timber merchants are well aware most of the wood
has been illegally felled, but no action has been taken to stop
the trade.
The Indonesian government is also concerned that cutting back
on timber permits has not been effective. Last year the
environment minister, Nabiel Makarim, admitted he did not know
how to combat illegal logging.
In response to international concern, the British and
Indonesian governments last year signed a memorandum of
understanding under which they agreed to work together on forest
law enforcement and to develop an identification method. This is
not yet in place.
Meanwhile, the European commission is also preparing measures
to combat the trade but none is expected before next year. Parts
of the European timber trade have responded through their own
initiatives to try to identify "legal timber" for the
marketplace, focusing initially on Indonesian mills.
A spokesman for the British Timber Trade Federation, which
represents all Britain's major timber dealers, said yesterday
that some of its members had agreed to stop sourcing wood from
Indonesia, but others wanted to continue.
"We cannot (yet) identify what are the legal and illegal
streams of timber. We are trying to get independent
verification," a spokesman said.
After exhausting most of Indonesia's primary rainforests,
illegal loggers have turned to national parks, and are now
threatening indigenous people and wildlife, including the orang-
utan. More than 40 percent of all Indonesia's forests have been
felled in the past 50 years.
Up to 50 percent of all tropical plywood in the UK comes from
Indonesia, but the British government and several timber
importers have been shown to be using illegal timber.