Posted on 13-5-2003

Logging Strips Indonesian Forests Bare
Thu May 8, Jim Lobe, OneWorld US

WASHINGTON, DC, May 8 (OneWorld) - Illegal logging in Indonesia has spun
out of control, according to international and Indonesian environmental
groups that are calling on paper products giant Georgia Pacific Corp. and
other foreign companies to suspend their purchases of wood products from
Indonesia until various conditions are met.

Friends of the Earth (news - web sites ) International (FoEI), a coalition
of more than 500 local Indonesian groups known as the Indonesian Forum for
Environment and the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago are
meeting this week to discuss how to implement their demands and press the
Indonesian government and companies that buy the illegal products into
taking action.

Approximately 10 percent of the world's remaining tropical forests are
found in Indonesia, and according to international environmental groups, as
much as 90 percent of all industrial wood extraction that takes place there
is illegal.

While the government's Forestry Department has set the maximum legal
allowable cut for the nation's forest at 6.9 million cubic meters this
year, the groups believe that the actual total will be ten times that
amount, to supply the nation's ply, pulp and saw mills.

As a result, the deforestation rate--already estimated at some five to six
million acres a year over the last several years--may increase in 2003,
according to FoEI.

In addition to destroying the forests, logging is causing indigenous
peoples and local communities who depend on the forest for their
livelihoods to become increasingly impoverished.

The groups say that Georgia Pacific is the main target of the public
campaign due to its dealings with logging and wood-processing operations
owned by the family of former President Soeharto and his cronies. Now--five
years after his ouster from power in a popular uprising--those operations
and the deforestation they have produced have not abated.

One of the worst-hit areas is Sumatra where Indonesia's pulp and paper
industry is based. In a report released last January, New York-based Human
Rights Watch (HRW) charged that the industry there had wreaked havoc on
both the environment and the property and human rights of the indigenous
people over the past 20 years.

With debts of more than US$20 billion, the industry has found itself
engaged in rampant deforestation in order to pay off the debt. The cycle
created by those pressures is not only devastating the island's lowland
tropical forests, but is also creating tensions with the indigenous people
there, according to the report, "Without Remedy: Human Rights Abuse and
Indonesia's Pulp and Paper Industry."

The report documented how local companies seized land with the help of
police and army units from indigenous Malay and Sakai communities, without
consultation or compensation, during Soeharto's rule. Since his ouster,
local people began to openly protest the loss of their lands and
livelihoods, but efforts to press their complaints through the judicial and
administrative systems have generally proven ineffectual.

The experience in Sumatra is symptomatic of what has happened throughout
the archipelago, according to HRW and FoEI. Some 50 million people in
Indonesia live in and from Indonesia's forests, but over the last 30 years
their rights to customary lands have been systematically and routinely
violated by the national government and, in particular, its Forestry
Department, FoEI said.

Recent attempts by the Department to prosecute big illegal operations have
routinely failed due to corruption in the police, the army, and the
judiciary, according to the Indonesian groups.

It is in this context that they have called for a moratorium on industrial
logging and for all buyers to suspend their purchases of Indonesian wood.

Optimally, the groups said they would support a certification system to
ensure that whatever logging takes place complies with sustainable
practices and respects the rights of local and indigenous peoples.

In a related development this week, the Washington-based Environmental
Investigation Agency (EIA) and an Indonesian environmental watchdog,
Telepak, released a report documenting the smuggling of illegally cut
timber from Indonesia through the port of Singapore which, according to the
two groups, has become a major transshipment point for contraband timber.

The two groups, which video-recorded a lengthy interview with one smuggler,
found that Singapore exported millions of dollars of illegal ramin--an
internationally protected tree species--to the U.S. without permits
required by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES) in a ten-month period last year.