Illegal Logging Threatens Indonesia's Wood-Base
COPYRIGHT 2000 XINHUA NEWS AGENCY
October 5, 2000
Illegal logging operations are the main factors contributing to deforestation in Indonesia, a government official said.
"The current levels of forest production would be hard to sustain if deforestation continues at its current pace," the Indonesian Observer daily Thursday quoted Silver Hutabarat, an official in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, as saying.
Hutabarat said here Wednesday at a forestry policy workshop that Indonesia's forest are decreasing at the rate of 1.6 million hectares per year.
Indonesia currently has 143 million hectares of forest, with 64 million hectares considered productive forest, while the remaining 79 hectares are off limits.
During the economic crisis in recent years, an increasing amount of loggers have illegally explored and logged the forest in the country. Officials said that 30 million cubic meters of wood products per year were produced from illegally logged wood.
Hutabarat said if illegal operations continue, the sustainable yield will be down and the lush forests of the country will be irreversibly impacted.
He called for guidelines and policies to be implemented to prevent mismanagement and misuse in the forest industry.