Protected park looted for timber

Protected park looted for timber

BENGKULU, Bengkulu: Ten percent of the protected Kerinci
Seblat National Park in Bengkulu had been deforested and used for
horticultural plantations, provincial forestry office head
Hidayat Syahid said on Tuesday.

Hidyat said more than 19,000 hectares of the 203,000-hectare
forest had been converted to commercial crops in several
districts across North Bengkulu Regency.

Other areas involving thousands of hectares of forest had
simply been logged and abandoned, he said.

"Besides the destruction in the protected forest, 37,000
hectares of Bengkulu's 219,000 hectares of nature reserves have
been denuded by similar activities."

North Bengkulu Regent Muslihan claimed his administration was
striving hard to deal with squatters in the forest, including by
conducting raids.

Based on data from the Bengkulu provincial administration in
1998, the regency had around 920,000 hectares of forest areas, 76
percent of which constituted protected and conservation forests.
The remainder comprised limited and fixed production forests.
--Antara