Repeal sought for 146 plantation concession licenses

Rusman, The Jakarta Post, Samarinda, East Kalimantan

An official here called on Wednesday for the regency and mayoralty governments in the province to revoke plantation concessionaire licenses that have already been issued to 146 firms.

The licenses are to be revoked on the grounds that the 146 firms had failed to meet requirements by the government to perform reforestation in the concession areas, said Ismet Barakhbah, the head of South Kalimantan Plantation Office.

"They only pulled down the trees, but they then failed to carry out the reforestation program in the area," he said.

The concessionaire area given to the 146 firms consists of a vast area of 2,503,686 hectares in the province.

Ismet said that the request to the regency and mayoralty administrations was made, on the grounds that they had the authority to revoke the licenses.

Ismet said that the regency and mayoralty administrations in the province previously revoked plantation concessionaire licenses for 20 firms last year, with a total area of 275,165 hectares.

They operated in Berau regency (12 firms), Pasir regency (6 firms) and Nunukan regency (2 firms).

Separately, a special environmental committee at the East Kalimantan provincial council received on Tuesday a report filed by Pasir and Berau regency administrations on illegal logging, the first since its establishment last week.

Ridwan Suwidi, a provincial councillor and a member of the Special Committee on the Environment, said the two administrations filed a complaint against the fast pace of illegal logging activities in their areas, which could rapidly degrade the environment there.

However, he declined to reveal any data on the illegal logging in the two regencies, as the special committee was still studying it. A recent statement by an official from the Ministry of Forestry has suggested that the environmental damage on Kalimantan has reached an alarming level.

Koes Saparjadi, Director General for Forest Protection and Conservation at the Ministry of Forestry, said Kalimantan lost at least 1,000 truck loads -- or about 10,000 cubic meters -- of illegal logs every week, in the May-June period alone.

The trucks carry the illegally harvested logs from Kalimantan to neighboring Malaysia.

Illegal logging in Indonesia's rain forests and national parks has been a major headache, especially after law and order deteriorated after the Asian economic crisis of 1997.

Of its 120.35 million hectares of natural rain forest, 43 million hectares have been devastated by illegal logging at a rate of 2.1 million hectares annually. The illicit activity has caused the country annual losses of Rp 30 trillion.