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Ilegal Timber Trade Concern of All Nations: SBY
Camelia Pasandaran | June 08, 2011

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Samsuncle
9:53am Jun 8, 2011

What needs to be identified and clarified is "Where do the trees go ?" I think you'll find not all the illegally logged timber is sold overseas. A lot of forests are cleared to make way for mining and palm oil plantations. The trees/evidence are often burnt. We all know about the issues of deforestation and global warming. There are summits and protests, laws and regulations, wild life groups and facebook causes, none of which have a real impact on the alarming rate at which the world's second biggest forest is disappearing. what we need is factual data. Information on 'who' is cutting for 'whom'.


enakajah
9:42am Jun 8, 2011

More rhetoric. Blame the others for buying what is on the market. Reluctance to sign the agreement with the EU. If they were serious there are a number of things that can be done. First and foremost is create a clean and very powerful enforcement body that will and can address illegal logging in the field. Clean men, powerful support, and a legal framework that is capable of prosecuting severely offending organizations. Another thing that is critical is to develop and maintain an accurate and detailed database of all the concessions in the country. Exact and up to date. Without this the enforcement agency cannot operate. We need to know who is licensed and who is not and the limits of their licenses. Then monitoring to UN REDD+ standards. Put these in place and form a KPK type forestry body and the steps are in place to get serious. However with the usual miasma of dozens of ministries involved in this, all with their own agendas, even more regional government bodies with their agendas and the number of huge commercial corporations with vast amounts of funds at stake topped off by the illegal logging it is going to take a very strong person to clamp down on it. Plus of course as Exbrit states, it all revolves around the money. With the number of people with their fingers in the till in this government and administration there is little hope that a body can be formed clean enough to address this seriously.

Stop the rhetoric, stop the inter-ministry squabbling, get the regional bodies under control and form an independent power forestry policing/presecuting body that is clean and has the power to make it unprofitable to break the law and perhaps it will change.


DrDez
9:16am Jun 8, 2011

Blame overseas again??? If your corrupt officials did not issue illegal licences things might be a whole lot better

Re Al Jaz - just search Indonesia on the videos for a report that is more embarrassing than the sklaughterhouse


P.Bear
8:40am Jun 8, 2011

Good to see that Zulkifli Hasan is yet another Indonesian minister with a really thorough knowledge of his subject. Must be those agreeable fact-finding trips to all the other countries that also grow the merbau tree...

exbrit
6:23am Jun 8, 2011

Unfortunately SBY is not taking into account the world's major "religion," which is money, so nothing is going to change.

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President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has called on other countries to help preserve Indonesia’s forests by not becoming markets for illegally logged Indonesian timber.

“In short, there are a lot of fences out there,” the president, referring to dealers in stolen goods, said on Tuesday at a ceremony to hand out environmental awards.

“Whenever we sell timber, we take the heat for deforestation. Certainly there are violations everywhere, which is what we’re cracking down on, but the truth is that there are also fences outside the country.”

He stressed that in order to protect the country’s forests, it behooved other countries to cooperate in preventing illegal logging.

“If you want to do good, let’s work together to sort out the timber industry,” Yudhoyono said.

“Other countries should stop fencing illegally felled timber. That’s the kind of deal that we need to work on. That’s why it’s only fair if the world contributes [financially] to helping forest countries that want to preserve their resources.”

Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan, speaking at the event, said the number of cases of illegal logging had increased in recent months. However, he declined to say which countries were suspected of receiving and selling illegal timber from Indonesia.

Industry watchers like Greenpeace have long speculated those countries are Malaysia, Singapore and China.

Zulkifli said Indonesia had recently signed an agreement with the European Union that was designed to identify and eventually exclude illegally logged timber products from EU markets in order to promote good forest governance in the exporting country.

Discussions on the agreement began in 2007 but only concluded in April this year.

“The rampant spread of illegal logging has prompted the government to campaign for legal certification for the timber trade,” Zulkifli said.

“For instance, the merbau tree is only found in Indonesia, so if there’s unlicensed merbau timber being traded, then it’s illegal. The trade must be stopped and the perpetrators prosecuted and jailed. That requires international cooperation. If it’s just us fighting to the death, then that’s not fair.”

The merbau tree, however, is not exclusive to Indonesia. It can be found in Southeast Asia, East Africa and Australia.

Environment Minister Gusti Muhammad Hatta said more needed to be done to stem illegal logging, given the difference between the rates of forest destruction and recovery.

“Forests in Indonesia are being destroyed at a rate of 700,000 hectares a year, while the rate of recovery and reforestation is only 500,000 hectares a year,” he said.

“This means we’re continuing to experience a net increase in forest destruction, which in turn leads to floods and mudslides that not only cause economic losses but loss of life.”

The calls for a crackdown on illegal logging came just weeks after Yudhoyono issued a much-criticized decree on a two-year moratorium.

The decree, issued more than five months after the moratorium was supposed to go into effect, has been widely lambasted by anti-logging activists as not doing enough to prevent the exploitation of forests for commercial purposes.