Indonesia may lose its natural forests in 15 years

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia is facing a severe depletion of forest resources and may lose its natural forest areas within 15 years if no strong commitment is given by the government and private sectors to practice sustainable forest management, experts have said.

Indonesia's natural forest areas fell by a dramatic 48 million hectares to 92.5 million hectares in 1999, from 140.4 million hectares in 1970, according to data from the Indonesian Forestry Community for Reforms.

Head of the planning office at the Ministry of Forestry and Plantations Moch. Toha said natural forest areas in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Irian Jaya had depleted rapidly in the last 13 years, with an accumulative average loss of 1.6 million hectares per year.

He said the fast pace of the permanent disappearance of natural forest areas was partly caused by the flawed policies of past governments.

"The government emphasized economic growth more and it propelled the exploitation of forest resources, especially timber, to help generate revenue," he told the post-Consultative Group for Indonesia (CGI) meeting on Indonesian forestry last week.

The government has since 1967 allocated no less than 60 million hectares of forest areas as forest concessions, among which obligations are to conduct a selective cutting and replanting system to ensure sustainable management.

The government then increased the exploitation of industrial forests in the late 1980s in order to provide raw materials for the country's rapidly growing pulp industry.

By the end of 1998, no less than 600 forest concessions, including those for industrial forests, operated on some 67 million hectares forest areas, producing raw materials to supply the country's annual demand of over 70 million cubic meters of timber for wood and pulp industries.

Toha acknowledged that the economic growth-oriented policy had led to the failure of the government to force concession holders to manage the forests and their businesses in a sustainable way.

Dayu Pradnja Resosudarmo of the Center for International Forestry Research shared Toha's views, saying that a large number of concession holders had routinely violated the regulations due to the lack of control and law enforcement from the government.

"They have overharvested, damaged the residual tress and conducted logging outside their cutting areas," he said.

He said the massive harvesting and overlogging was partly a result of the fact that timber concessionaires had to provide more raw materials for the country's wood and pulp industries, which had so excessively grown that they demanded more raw materials than the forests could naturally provide.

The country's wood and pulp industries multiplied their annual production capacities to reach 3.9 million tons in 1998 from only 605,900 million tons in 1988. These industries need about 70 million cubic meters of timber per year, while the natural forests, using sustainable management standards, could only produce about 20 million cubic meter a year.

Dayu said the deforestation in the timber concession areas had been made worse because the concession holders had no intention of properly replanting the areas.

Toha said in order to curb the deforestation rate the government had intended to uphold law enforcement and minimize the natural forest conversion.

Official data estimates that 60 percent out of about 48 million natural forest areas which disappeared in the last 30 years were converted into commercial plantations, industrial sites, agricultural expansion areas and new settlement or transmigration sites.

No less than 2.8 million hectares of natural forest areas were converted into oil palm plantations alone by 1988, from only 300,000 million hectares in 1980.

The World Bank has accused Indonesia of failing to comply to the International Monetary Funds' guidelines on the reduction of land conversion targets and being ineffective in reducing illegal logging.

"Forest conversion, as well as illegal logging, is even occurring in areas where major donor countries to the forest sector, such as Japan, World Bank and the European Union, are supporting the forest conservation," the international organization said.

The World Bank said donor countries were seriously worried about the way Indonesia managed its natural forests.

The country's forest management will be the main issue in the donors next meeting in Jakarta from Feb. 1 to Feb. 2, during which Indonesia's government is expected to come up with a clear and better program of forest management. (cst)