Indonesia's forests falling victim to faulty policies

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.