Repeal sought for 146 plantation concession licenses

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.