Pulp wood estates face hurdles from land clearing

JAKARTA (JP): Land-clearing problems and lengthy negotiations with indigenous people are the main reasons for the slow development of pulp wood estates, a forestry executive said yesterday.

Hendro Prastowo, the executive chairman of the Association of Indonesian Forest Concessionaires (APHI), explained that land clearing, which is often related to traditional land rights, can take months and sometimes years for a forest concessionaire to settle.

"So even if a company has already gained an 'allotment approval' -- government approval to manage a certain area -- the company may still need more time to actually start planting," Hendro said.

After gaining an allotment approval, he said, the firm must then seek approval from its "neighbors", including other concessionaires and indigenous villagers, with whom it shares borders and, possibly, overlaps.

Only then can the government issue a decree allowing the company to start operations.

Nonetheless, Hendro admitted that several concessionaires failed to reach their plantation targets not because of land- clearing problems but simply because of negligence.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Forestry, companies given concessions to develop pulp wood estates to support their pulp and paper plants have so far planted 519,781 hectares or only 13 percent of the 4.05 million hectares of timber estates targeted by the government.

The statistics issued by APHI, however, show that as of last December, forest concessionaires had planted only 597,418 hectares of pulp wood estates or almost 15 percent of the target of 4.05 million hectares.

Hendro said yesterday that the government had set the planting target for 10 years in 1989, when it first started issuing concessions the task of helping to supply materials to pulp producers.

Most of the wood estates already developed were established by the first 13 companies to get concessions. They were allotted 2.63 million hectares of concession areas by the government.

Now, nine additional firms have submitted proposals for a similar purpose and the government has allocated an additional 1.42 million hectares for them. So far, however, they have planted only 26,273 hectares.

As of last year, Indonesia's pulp industry, according to APHI statistics, had a total production capacity of 2.54 million tons a year.

Last year Indonesia produced 2.02 million tons of pulp, of which 900,000 tons were exported. The country also imported 751,400 tons of pulp last year to meet its annual demand of about 1.89 million tons.(pwn)