Indonesia's forests falling victim to faulty policies

The haze that is currently choking Kalimantan and Riau has become a yearly occurrence, and underlines the government's faulty policies in addressing forestry issues. The haze can be seen as a direct result of the government's blatant disregard of the principles of sustainable development.

It has been three decades now since forest exploitation, commercial logging and forest-based industries made their first significant contributions to the country's foreign exchange earnings, joining the oil and gas sector.

These financial gains, however, have never been packaged with efforts to sustain the country's raw materials.

Thousands upon thousands of hectares of trees in the country's virgin rainforests have been felled, leaving only 28 percent of the original 162 million hectares of forests.

Although Indonesia's forests are in critical condition -- a recent World Bank study predicted that thousands of hectares of forests in Kalimantan and Sumatra would disappear forever within the next three to seven years -- the government has failed to take any significant measures to curb this dreadful trend. Instead, it has allowed industrial logging to continue at an unsustainable pace.

The Jakarta Post's Fitri Wulandari and Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak trace the government's policies on forestry and forest-related issues, to find out the core of the problems. The following are their reports.