Pledge to save forests needs dust off
Berni K. Moestafa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Former state minister of environment Emil Salim, who went to the Rio de Janeiro world summit in 1992, must be disappointed.
Not only has the government failed to follow up its pledges under the Rio declaration, forests are disappearing faster today than at anytime in the past.
Experts said Indonesia will have to revive its 10-year-old pledge at upcoming talks on sustainable development, as rapid deforestation would render new commitments useless.
"I don't see much use of any summit if we don't stick to their agreements," said Tedjo Wahyu Jatmiko of Konphalindo, a consortium promoting forest conservation.
The second summit on sustainable development will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa from late August to September.
Over the next two weeks Bali will hold the final round of talks to produce the draft of the agreement that world leaders will sign in Johannesburg.
Tedjo said he hoped the preparatory meeting in Bali would restore the government's commitment, and this time for good.
"I have yet to see the impact of the Rio declaration we agreed to 10 years ago," he said.
In 1992 at Rio de Janeiro, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development -- known as the Earth Summit -- adopted a declaration outlining countries' rights and responsibilities towards the environment.
Participants also adopted Agenda 21: a blueprint for greener development in the 21st century.
In 1997 Indonesia set up its national Agenda 21, covering sectors like energy, mining, human settlement and forestry.
However efforts to break down the agenda into supporting regulations in the forestry sector have came to nothing.
"I once asked officials about the agenda, and no one appears to have heard of it," Tedjo said.
Instead forest exploitation has gone from bad to worse.
Indonesia is home to the world's second largest area of tropical forests: 108.5 million hectares.
But with between 1.6 million to 2.1 million hectares of forests disappearing each year, deforestation here ranks among the fasted in the world, according to the Ministry of Forestry.
It is the result of a 40-year-old policy that puts forest sustainability behind short-term economic goals.
While revenue flows, trees disappear. Kalimantan's forests could vanish in nine years, Sumatra's lowland forests in four, according to the World Bank projection.
The government estimates 294 flora and fauna species are threatened by the rapid deforestation.
Humans too feel the consequence as is evident in the rising incidents of landslides and flooding.
The latter hit Jakarta early this year, killing at least 45 people and displacing thousands of others for weeks.
In danger is also the future of around 60 million people whose life depends on forest resources, according to the World Bank.
Resource scarcity has led to increased conflicts among forest communities. Looting intensified in forest areas owned by timber operations.
Tedjo said Agenda 21 was meant to anticipate these problems.
But of the various sectors the national agenda outlines and the government followed up on, only the forestry sector was left without the needed regulations, he said.
"This (Johannesburg summit) has always been viewed as a project of the Ministry of Environment, so I guess they failed to secure the support of other ministries, including the Ministry of Forestry."
Outside the government, business interests more often than not, work against sustainable forest management efforts.
To be sure, the forestry industry shares the same concern of preserving forest areas to ensure long term supply.
But the ongoing mass conversion of forest for production shows quicker ways exist to cover the question of supply.
Concerns over replenishment have also become more immediate.
In one example, Asia's largest pulp and paper concern outside Japan, the Singapore based Asia Pulp & Paper Company Ltd. (APP) scrambles to secure more trees for its giant mills in Indonesia.
With US$13.9 billion in debts it cannot pay, pressure mounts for APP to increase output to make any debt restructuring proposals look feasible.
APP's case may be extreme, but supply shortfalls plague many others in the industry and undermine their current commitment to sustainable forest management.
And while the forestry industry at least takes part in the discussion on sustainable development, illegal loggers do not.
Their foray into Indonesian forests go unabated. The World Bank said Indonesia was loosing $600 million a year from the illegal export of timber.
Environmentalists valued the annual loss at Rp 3 trillion (about $3.2 billion), and called this a conservative estimate.
There is suspicion local companies, faced with a supply shortfall at home, resort to importing back Indonesian timber that was illegally exported to Malaysia. Others derive their supply from illegal loggers.
Against this multitude of problems, the draft sets out a new approach towards forestry management through five steps.
They include reaching a national consensus for the creation of an overarching forest management policy; revising laws and regulations with greater public participation; empowering indigenous people of the forests in the planning and implementation and evaluation of forest management policies.
But for this to happen, Indonesia's overall stance towards sustainable development must become stronger, said environmental expert Mas Achmad Santosa.
"There must be an emphasize on good governance. The absence of this has been the weakness of the Rio declaration," he said.
According to him, good governance implies the presence of a civil society.
Political and social reforms following the 1997 economic crisis paved the way for a civil society to emerge, said the government in a draft statement about the national Agenda 21.
"The multi-fold crisis that hit Indonesia in 1997 is a valuable lesson which serves as a wake-up call on the unsustainability of our development program," it said.
Let's hope this lesson will stick when Indonesia commits itself again towards sustainable forest management in Johannesburg.