Regents charged with selling forest concessions

Regents charged with selling forest concessions

JAKARTA (JP): The government will take to court four regents
from East Kalimantan for allegedly selling forest concessions, a
senior official of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry said
on Tuesday.

Secretary-General of the ex-ministry of forestry and
plantations Suripto said that one of the four regents have sold
up to 370 concessions, each covering 100 hectares of forest land.

The concessions were sold at around Rp 10 million ($US1,200)
to Rp 600 million depending on the type of forests, he said.

"It is more expensive for permits for virgin forests," Suripto
said after opening a workshop on forestry here.

The four regents were not only charged with "commercializing"
the permits but have also violated the law, he said.

According to him, the concessions issued by the four regents
are not valid because they were issued after the government
introduced a new forestry law late last year.

Although the government has yet to issue guidelines on the
mechanism of the issuance of new forestry concessions, the
government regulation No. 6/1999 which allowed regency
administrations to issue forestry concessions on areas of up to
100 hectares were no longer valid with the implementation of the
new law, he said.

Suripto, who will end his term in January next year following
the merger of the ministry with the ministry of agriculture into
the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, said that the issuance
of the new forestry concessions had also encouraged the smuggling
of heavy logging equipment from Malaysia.

At least 700 units of heavy logging equipment, with a capacity
of felling 5,000 cubic meters of trees per month, had been
illegally imported from the neighboring country.

He said that his office was currently coordinating with the
Customs and Excise Office to find out what kind of import permit
they use.

Workshop

The two-day workshop, organized by the Ministry of Plantations
and Forestry in conjunction with Japan International Cooperation
Agency (JICA), and the European Union's Forest Liaison Bureau, is
the last of a series of workshops held between August and October
in accordance with Indonesia's commitment to the Consultative
Group on Indonesia (CGI).

In the CGI meeting on Feb. 1 in Jakarta, Indonesia made a
commitment to invite the cooperation and coordination of other
ministries to impose strong measures against illegal loggers and
the closure of illegal sawmills, to speed up forest resource
assessment, and to evaluate the policy on natural forest
conversions.

It also agreed to downsize and restructure wood-based
industries, close heavily-indebted wood industries under the
Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA), synchronize
reforestation programs with existing forest industries,
recalculate the real value of timber, and use the
decentralization process as a tool to enhance sustainable forest
management.

Suripto said that failure to execute the eight commitments
could affect the new loan commitment from the CGI.

The workshop on Tuesday was aimed to create a uniform
perception of forestry among government officials and related
institutions, as well as to form a plan of action for the
sustainability of Indonesian forests, he said.

The results of the workshop would be presented in the upcoming
CGI meeting on Oct. 17 and Oct. 18, he said.

Suripto, who also heads the illegal logging sector of the
Interdepartmental Committee on Forestry, said on his part he will
report some preventative actions his team has done since February
and what will be done in the future.

He said that in a week's time he would announce the names of
more than 10 people allegedly involved with illegal logging,
among them a businessman at a wood-based company in Central Java
with the initials KLI.

Suripto said that illegal logging activities had been
uncovered in Riau and Jambi in Sumatra, the Gunung Leuser
National Park in Aceh, West Bali National Park in Bali, Bukit 30
National Park in Riau, Tanjung Puting National Park in Central
Kalimantan, and Kutai National Park in East Kalimantan.

Illegal logging activities had damaged some 1.6 million
hectares of forest between February and August this year, and had
caused the loss of Rp 1.2 billion (US$141,200) in annual taxes.
(10)