Firm action against illegal loggers sought
SANUR, Bali (JP): An executive of the timber-processing industry urged the government here on Wednesday to immediately take firm measures against illegal logging.
"If the government doesn't take any action against the illegal loggers, all the wood-processing companies in the country could go bankrupt within the next six months," Nana Suparna of the Association of Indonesian Forest Concessionaires (APHI), said on the sidelines of the East Asia Regional Ministerial Conference on Forest Law Enforcement and Governance (FLEG).
Suparna revealed that illegal logging operators, mostly in the form of small-scale sawmills, had flooded the market with cheap logs, thereby badly affecting the market share of the legal operators.
"To produce one cubic meters of plywood, for example, the legal timber producer is forced to spend at least Rp 3.2 million (US$347.8) for various purposes, including taxes, workers' wages and reforestation fees," he said.
"So, in order to gain a 15 percent profit, we would have to sell the plywood at $400 per cubic meter on the international market."
By contrast, there was no need for the illegal loggers to spend such large sums of money with the result that they were able to sell their products at much cheaper prices, Suparna said.
By comparison, a cubic meter of plywood sold for $250 on the international market, he said, adding, "that's why many legal timber-processing companies have gone bankrupt over the last couple of years."
Suparna further disclosed the irony of how several furniture firms in Purwakarta, West Java, were importing timber products from Singapore instead of buying them from Kalimantan or Sumatra, because the products from Singapore were very cheap.
"Singapore doesn't have any forests, does it? Our illegal loggers smuggle the logs there and later our factories buy them from that country.
"They could not afford to buy materials from the domestic, legal timber industry since they are too expensive for them," Suparna said.
A similar concern was raised earlier by various non- governmental organizations, which called for the immediate imposition of a moratorium on all industrial-scale felling to help protect existing forests in Indonesia
They argued that the moratorium would enable the government to rehabilitate damaged forests and simultaneously restructure the inefficient timber industry and trade.
"The government can reassign the workers from the plants to the state-funded forest rehabilitation programs, or recruit them as forest rangers. Those two options were successfully implemented by the government of China during its moratorium period," Longgena Ginting of the Indonesian Environment Forum (Walhi) said.
However, Suparna did not agree with the NGOs' call as a moratorium would deal a devastating blow to the legal timber industry.
"I believe that the solution does not lie with what kind of policy is to be implemented, but more with whether our government is ready to enforce the law strongly and consistently," he said.
"Right now, the illegal loggers continue to fell trees in restricted areas, including the national parks and conserved forests, despite the prohibitions in place. I believe that they will continue doing so even if a moratorium is being implemented," he stated.
Suparna disclosed that currently there were around four million people employed by firms in the legal timber industry.
"We are talking about 20 million souls depending, directly or indirectly, on the timber industry. Who will be responsible for providing them with alternative sources of incomes if the moratorium policy is implemented. Not to mention that there are already around 40 million unemployed people in this country because of the economic crisis," he said. (zen)