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.