Global Policy Forum

By Jim Lobe

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 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. In 2001 Indonesia banned the trade in ramin after widespread illegal cutting was detected in four national parks that are home to highly endangered orangutans.

Release of the report was timed to coincide with the signing in Washington Tuesday of the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement by President George W. Bush and Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. EIA said it feared that the new accord, the first between the United States and an Asian nation, could result in more illegally cut timber being shipped or smuggled through Asia to the United States.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.