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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Indonesia's Timber Industry: Rape of the Rainforest

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

12/23/96

OVERVIEW & SOURCE by EE

Following is a Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) feature article

detailing rainforest destruction in Indonesia, including Irian

Jaya. The contiguous rainforests of Malaysia, Indonesia and

Papua New Guinea are fragmented and greatly diminishing,

particularly in the first two with PNG just now under first

assault. The decline in rainforests and biodiversity continues

at an accelerating rate. Happy New Year!

g.b.

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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:

RAPE OF THE RAINFOREST

The Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday, December 14, 1996

Why Indonesia's biggest industries leave the wetlands bald

Asia's lung, the world's largest tract of rainforest outside

Brazil, is rapidly shrinking. Herald Correspondent LOUISE

WILLIAMS reports from Sugai Kapuas, West Kalimantan.

THIS is Indonesian ironwood, the logging camp supervisor

explains, over the racket of the screaming chainsaws. The timber

is so dense it does not float, and so durable that the oldest

ironwood houses along the broad red river have been standing for

hundreds of years, refusing to rot even during floods.

The hot dirt clearing by the riverbank is piled high with the

magnificent thick trunks of tropical hardwood, one of the most

precious natural commodities on earth.

Every month about 500 more trees, some more than 50 metres high,

are pulled out of what were virgin rainforests in the interior of

Borneo to this logging camp and rafted down-river for processing,

with the ironwood trunks strapped to lighter timber for

floatation. The legendary ironwood is particularly prized, the

supervisor says, but it is an increasingly rare symbol of these

forests, like the vanishing slow-moving river goldfish which

carry their eggs in their mouths and spurt them out as they

hatch, alive and wriggling.

The timber company has another 25 years of rights to log the

forests, but the nearby trees have already been thinned out and

now the mammoth yellow trucks must drive two hours inland to find

the really valuable timber.

Even if a proper replanting program were carried out, the forest

could not possibly recover in 25 years, the supervisor says, as

though this must be common knowledge. These trees, lying stripped

and ready for the chainsaw, are very, very old.

Across the river, the hills are almost bald. Rows of baby palms

are just peeping out of the soil, the second attempt to grow

something on the land which once supported the tall trees.

The contrast is stark. Back up the river, around a few quiet

bends where a tract of virgin forest remains, giant flowering

fruit-trees reach right down to the water, dwarfing the odd canoe

which slips silently by. The tree ferns and orchids cling to the

forks high up in the tree canopy, while the river below branches

off into tiny streams enclosed in a natural leafy arbour.

Indonesia is the world's largest exporter of plywood, and home to

the second-largest tract of tropical rainforest in the world,

outside Brazil. Its forests are Asia's lungs, particularly after

the major forest losses in south-east Asia since the 1960s.

Thailand banned logging in the early 1990s under pressure from

local environmentalists when its forest cover fell to 16 per

cent, but Indonesia continues to rely heavily on wood-based

products and is actively developing its paper and pulp

industries. Nearly 55 per cent of the world's plywood comes from

Indonesian forests, and an increasing share of timber furniture

and paper products.

According to the Indonesian Government, 64 million hectares of

forest, or more than a third of the country's land-mass, are

covered by commercial logging concessions. Income from wood-based

products makes up more than 25 per cent of export earnings from

non-oil and gas products, and some provinces, particularly in

Borneo, are almost entirely dependent on cutting wood.

In the 1960s, 82 per cent of the land of the vast collection of

islands which make up Indonesia was covered with tropical

forests, some of the most remote and biologically diverse patches

of green on earth. By 1982, forest cover had fallen to 68 per

cent and the most recent satellite images put the present cover

at 53 per cent. Early explorers who set out on foot through

Borneo described a tropical canopy so dense that from a distance

the tops of the trees looked like smooth, grass fields.

"As we moved slowly up-river, these forests were like a dream

come true, a dream of abundance, of beauty and peace, but also of

mystery alive behind this wall," wrote the Cambridge University

botanist Patrick Synge during a journey across Borneo 60 years

ago. "All abstract words for concrete objects - yet the power of

forest forces is so great we cannot be impartial to it. Man

cannot fail to be dominated by the forests. So dominant is the

forest it is said to be possible for an orangutan to travel from

the south to the north of Borneo without descending from the

tree-tops."

Present-day maps show no public roads across much of Borneo's

remote interior, but they are there, many inside the private

logging concessions which cover the island like a patchwork

quilt.

Like private fiefdoms, these vast tracts of land are off-limits

to the local people and visitors, without permission from the

concession-holders. It is only a matter of minutes before we are

directed by the security guards to leave the logging camp.

Timber rights and political and economic power are closely linked

in Indonesia. More than a third of the concession areas are

controlled by 10 prominent companies, many with links to the

armed forces.

Many early logging concessions were clear-cut, the thin topsoil

washed away in the first rains and the land left unable to

support anything more than the giant green-brown elephant grass

which grows like a weed, taller than a person. Two years ago, the

biggest fire recorded in the history of the world raged through

Borneo's forests, closing airports as far north as Kuala Lumpur.

Officially, the blaze was blamed on the small number of local

tribal people still practising slash-and-burn cultivation in the

area. But in reality the fire demonstrated how profoundly the

environment was changing along this band of the equator, formerly

green and damp all year round.

Now so-called "non-productive" land is being turned into timber

estates, a policy which will re-green the land but replace

enormous bio-diversity with quick-growing mono-culture softwood

trees.

Environmentalists say consultants have been brought in to falsely

assess land as "non-productive" to allow the two-stage process of

clear-cutting and conversion to a timber estate to go ahead,

feeding the powerful pulp and paper industries. These industries

are a major environmental concern because the huge volume of

biological waste and chlorine bleach being dumped into rivers is

a serious threat to water quality in many isolated areas.

Tropical rainforests hold moisture in the earth, and in these

areas at least four metres of rain falls a year, meaning it rains

on average about four days out of five. But the tracts of denuded

land are now so large that the rivers flow heavy with red earth,

the run-off from the bare watersheds. The island's biggest river,

the Kapuas, last year rose 15 metres in the wet season, an

alarming signal that the forest is so damaged it can no longer

store water. In the dry months, all that was left of the Kapuas

were a few streams winding through a wide arid river bed.

The Indonesian Government publicly acknowledges the threat to its

forests and has pulled back from clear-cutting in many areas.

"The Government has taken a number of measures designed to

support the drive for sustainable development, including a stop

on the issue of new logging concessions," a recent official

report said.

But the environmental group Wahli, an authority on the area, says

the provision for converting damaged forest land into timber

estates is encouraging the destruction of tropical forests rather

than their rehabilitation.

"This process is a worrying indication for Indonesian tropical

forests, and if it keeps going the Indonesian forests will be

replaced by monoculture estates," the groups said.

THE World Bank reported in 1994 that 15 million hectares of

tropical forest had been turned into unproductive grassland, and

a further 20 million hectares of watershed land was in a critical

condition because of deforestation.

"One estimate suggests that the bulk of recent deforestation in

Indonesia is a result of officially sanctioned (or at least

tolerated) programs of conversion to timber estates," the bank

reported. "The real issue is whether the decision to convert is

properly made, and the evidence is that the current logging

activity is above sustainable levels."

The bank estimated deforestation was occurring at the rate of

about 800,000 hectares a year, which was roughly equivalent to

the area being logged, suggesting little progress in the

rehabilitation of forests.

It reported anecdotal evidence of the allocation of virgin or

regenerating tropical forests to plywood and pulp and paper

investors who have clear-felled the concessions and used the

mature tropical timber as an interim supply for their mills until

their plantation trees reach an exploitable size.

At issue, too, is the question of who profits from the land

clearances. A recent report by the Indonesian Business Data

Centre said only 17 per cent of the profits from the

multi-billion dollar forestry industry went back to the

Government. However, the Government reported this year that a

$US1.73 billion ($2.18 billion) fund would be built up over the

next five years from concession royalties to fund reforestation

projects.

A significant exception to the new rules banning further logging

concessions and limiting the expansion of sawmills and plywood

factories is the eastern province of Irian Jaya.

The forests of Irian Jaya are widely known for their biological

diversity and vulnerability. The towering central mountains

support the world's only tropical glacier which has recently been

found to be shrinking because of mining and forestry activities.

Three years ago, only 7 per cent of Indonesia's logging

concessions were in Irian Jaya, one of the last pristine

wilderness areas left on Earth. Now 18 per cent of logging

concessions are on Irian Jaya, classified by the Government as a

"more sustainable area" for forestry.

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