Jakarta Globe, Fidelis E Satriastanti | May 21, 2011
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| An illegal logger cuts down a tree to be turned into planks for construction in a forest south of Sampit, in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province. Indonesia is one of the world's leading emitters of the greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, but activists say a new moratorium on forest clearance omits a third of all forest area. (Reuters Photo) |
Sighs of relief from activists on Thursday that a long-awaited two-year moratorium on forest clearance permits had finally been signed were drowned out on Friday after it emerged that more than a third of Indonesia’s forest area will not be covered.
“The announcement is a far cry from the commitment made by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono related to forest protection and leads to big questions on its implementation,” said Bustar Maitar, a Greenpeace forest campaigner.
A presidential adviser on climate change on Thursday said that Yudhoyono had finally signed the two-year moratorium that had been scheduled to have come into effect in January. But after details of the moratorium were released at a news conference on Friday, discontent was on the rise.
Bustar voiced anger that the moratorium only covered primary forests and peatland, which were already protected by the law. “[There are] still millions of hectares of Indonesia’s forests that will be destroyed,” he said.
A map attached to the moratorium documents shows that 64.2 million hectares of primary forest and 31.9 million hectares of peatland were covered, but not 36.6 million hectares of secondary forest. Primary forest is untouched by agriculture or industry, secondary forest is part of areas that have been partially cleared for agricultural or industrial use.
“Greenpeace has estimated that 104.8 million hectares of forest should be included in the moratorium,” Bustar added.
Giorgio Budi Indrarto, program manager for forest and climate at the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law, said the moratorium was inadequate. “The primary forests in Indonesia are declining, but the total area [covered by them] is open to question. [Areas] called primary forest include the national parks. So, what’s the use of the permit moratorium if it only covers primary forests [as these are mostly protected already]?” he said.
The 1999 Forestry Law, Giorgio said, did not contain any reference to primary forest and instead used the terms protected forest, conservation forest and production forest to describe areas where varying degrees of human activity were allowed.
“How is it that something that did not [legally] exist suddenly becomes recognized?” he said, noting that the government was not consistent in its use of legal terms.
Teguh Surya, head of climate justice at the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), said the term had no prior legal basis. “It is only a technical definition which is only used to define the levels of forest degradation and should not be put into context of policy or issuing permits,” Teguh said.
He also said the moratorium should not have been issued in the form of a presidential instruction [Inpres].
“A presidential instruction is only the president’s instruction to individual government officials” and therefore lacks the authority of, for instance, a full-blown law, he said.
Giorgio said there was also the problem of companies eying underground mining concessions in protected forests that already received a “permit in principle” from the Forestry Ministry and would thus not be covered by the moratorium. He pointed out these were not actual permits, suggesting there should be a possibility to not grant such companies permission to advance.
“In the past, a decision approved ‘in principle’ could always be changed,” Giorgio said.
He also said that the moratorium contained no instruction to law enforcers, “as if all the complexity of forest issues in the country can be solved by administrative means only.”
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