Restructure forest-based industries

Restructure forest-based industries

Lately Indonesia has seen new culprits accelerating
deforestation of the country's already depleted natural forests.
The Ministry of Forestry claims that deforestation is worsening
as local administrations are currently in a race to give
businesspeople hundreds of timber concession licenses in order to
help fill the regions' coffers.

Nearly every regency in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua has
issued an average of 150 timber licenses for the past two years.
According to a report from the Inspectorate General of the
Ministry of Forestry, each license covers an area of up to 10,000
hectares. That adds up to around 1.5 million hectares of forests
licensed to be denuded by irresponsible parties every year.

The issuance of licenses has become uncontrollable, due to the
ill-prepared autonomy law of 2001 which provides local
administrations the authority to manage local natural resources.
It has become the subject of dispute for the last two years
between the central government and local administrations.

In fact local administrations are not the main culprits behind
the rapidly depleting natural forests. Unbridled deforestation
had been going on for decades in this country before the autonomy
law came into effect.

Forest cover across the country fell from 162 million hectares
in 1950 to only about 98 million hectares in 2000, a loss of
almost 1.3 million hectares on average every year. Between 1985
through 1998, during the Soeharto regime, the rate of
deforestation varied between 1.6 million hectares and 1.8 million
hectares a year. In the year 2000 alone Indonesia lost more than
2 million hectares of natural forests, an area half the size of
Switzerland. By 2002, the rate reached more than 2.4 million
hectares.

The damage does not stop there. In a conservative estimate of
the remaining 95 million hectares of forests, not less than 40.26
million hectares have been affected by deforestation. It is not
very difficult to calculate how many more years would be left
before there are no forests remaining in the whole country, with
all the negative consequences not only for Indonesia, but for the
whole world as well. Tropical forests which serve as the lungs of
the earth -- besides other vital functions -- will be limited to
some remaining patches in Africa and South America.

One of the factors that stimulates this rapid acceleration of
deforestation is the fact that the installed capacity of wood-
based enterprises in the country has reached an incredible figure
of 80 million cubic meters a year. Out of that figure, the
estimated actual capacity is around 63 million cubic meters a
year.

On the other hand, the licensed log production permitted by
the Ministry of Forestry is only around 12 million m3 a year,
which is already far beyond the sustainable capacity of the
remaining forests across the country. The ministry plans to
disburse log production licenses this year limited to only about
6.4 million m3.

The incredibly huge discrepancy between supply and demand,
with pulp and plywood mills alone already devouring wood much
faster than forests can grow, is the main stimulus that leads to
illegal logging. It is the main stimulus that drives almost
everybody who have some power to recklessly cut down Indonesian
forests.

With the issuance of Presidential Decree No. 80 in 2000, the
government launched the Inter-Departmental Committee on Forestry
(IDCF) to coordinate efforts in curbing illegal logging. So far
the IDCF has failed to perform its duty, mostly because it has
not focused its efforts on decreasing the capacity of wood-based
enterprises to a level that matches the sustainable capacity of
our natural forests.

Of course restructuring is not easy and neither is it
costless. Among other things, restructuring implies unemployment
for tens of thousands of people currently working in that sector.
However, that cost is negligible compared to the irreplaceable
tropical forests that we still have and to the losses that the
country already has had to bear.

The government cannot afford to stall any longer. It has to
immediately take bold moves to restructure the wood-based
industry, decrease its capacity, close down more than 100
forestry companies now under the supervision of IBRA, and put a
moratorium on forest concessions. That is the only way to stop
illegal logging which costs us around $4 billion a year. That is
the only way to save our tropical forests from total destruction.