Govt must think twice in plantation plan

Anissa S. Febrina, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Transparency and public consultation on the details of the project are needed before the government carries out any plan to create a vast oil palm plantation along the Indonesian-Malaysian border in Borneo, an NGO says.

Most development comes at a cost to the environment, but those costs could be minimized by being prudent and transparent.

"We are not against development, but there are ways of doing it without great environmental damage," non-governmental organization Greenomics Indonesia executive director Elfian Effendi said.

"The government must be transparent on the plan before going through with it," he added.

The remarks were made at a time when the government -- including local administrations -- is moving ahead with the massive oil palm plantation that was first announced earlier this year.

Documents obtained by the Greenomics showed that the East Kalimantan administration had already allocated 215,000 hectares of land in its three regencies to be cleared as part of the planned plantation.

That area includes 17,000 hectares of government-funded community plantations.

The West Kalimantan provincial administration has also mentioned its version of the plantation's development, although no further details were available.

The exact locations of the giant plantation has yet to be made clear in those two provinces' initial proposals, but it would most likely affect parts of the 2.2 million hectares encompassed by three national conservation parks along the border with Malaysia.

The project, which would cover 1.8 million hectares in total, is expected to require an investment of around Rp 6.45 trillion (about US$645 million), 98 percent of which would be funded by private investors.

Environmentalists have previously warned that ecological losses due to the clearing of natural forests would amount to Rp 27 trillion annually, due to environmental degradation.

"Clearing more land would be damaging to the economy in the long run, both in Indonesia and in Sarawak (Malaysia)," said environmentalist Sofyan P. Warsito from Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University.

Currently, of the 2.3 million hectares of plantation areas in West Kalimantan alone, 1.5 million hectares have been abandoned. They were earlier cleared for plantations that never materialized.

"If it were truly for development, the government must make sure that it would affect the 300,000 local inhabitants there in the long run and not merely be a temporary project," Elfian added.

A Greenomics' study shows there might be additional economic motives, apart from the yields to be gained from the planned project.

The economic value of timber on both natural and production forest in the border area, which will have to be clear cut, amounts to Rp 212.9 trillion and Rp 24.8 trillion, respectively.