'Wild cancer' takes toll on forests, minister says
'Wild cancer' takes toll on forests, minister says
Theresia Sufa, The Jakarta Post, Karawang, West Java
If Indonesian forests were hospital patients, they would be late-
stage cancer patients with their days numbered, the Minister of
Forestry says.
Speaking at a PT Toyota factory in Karawang on Saturday, Malam
Sambat Kaban said if the "virus" of illegal logging was not
eradicated soon, the country's forests would only survive for
another 15 years.
"The green belt stretching from Aceh to Papua, which balances
the climates in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, would
vanish," he said.
Kaban made the visit as part of his consultation with industry
about environmental problems.
Statistics showed that out of a total of 120 million hectares
of forest area in the country, nearly 60 million ha had been
degraded or destroyed in the past two decades mostly because of
logging, with an average of 2.8 million ha ruined each year,
Kaban said.
"(Forests are) like a human with stage IV cancer. I cannot
imagine the impact on the global climate as its tropical forests,
or the world's lungs, are damaged."
The financial losses suffered by this country from illegal
logging were estimated from Rp 34 trillion (US$3.4 billion) to Rp
45 trillion annually, he said.
"That doesn't include the losses estimated from non-timber
products, which contain medical elements."
Aside from working to rehabilitate the damaged forests, Kaban
said his office had urged industry to green the environment by
turning vacant land into forests.
About 17 million ha of unproductive, converted forest areas in
the country were being claimed by many parties, he said, with
forest areas often the first to fall victim to the establishment
of a new administrative region. Local governments tended to turn
forests into plantations by burning them, which caused forest
fires and international pollution problems.
"There is no such a thing as (a spontaneous) forest fire (in
Indonesia). Instead, people are opening land by burning it for
the sake of efficiency," Kaban said, referring to the recent
forest fires on Sumatra, which have created thick haze that
reached Malaysia.
Kaban said his office had coordinated with Malaysia's Ministry
of Environment and Ministry of Plantations to settle the haze
problem.