Jakarta Globe, Feb 22, 2015
Jakarta. Eleven people have been arrested in Riau for illegal forest clearing, a major issue for Indonesia which is grappling with one of the fastest rates of deforestation in the world.
Illegal forest clearing for plantations is a major problem for Indonesia. (AFP Photo/Chaideer Mahyuddin) |
Jakarta. Eleven people have been arrested in Riau for illegal forest clearing, a major issue for Indonesia which is grappling with one of the fastest rates of deforestation in the world.
Police
arrested seven suspects in Bukit Batu subdistrict, two in Bengkalis subdistrict
and two more in Pinggir subdistrict, police said on Sunday.
“Police
found six wood cutting tools, a jerry can filled with fuel and a motorcycle as
evidence,” the chief of Bengkalis Police, Adj. Sr. Cmr. Aloysius Supriadi, told
Tempo.co.
Aloysius
said the eleven people detained are suspected of illegal land clearing and
illegal logging.
The arrests
come just days after a new study claimed that more than 30 percent of the
timber used by Indonesia’s industrial forest sector is sourced from illegal and
unsustainable sources.
The report,
published this week by the Anti Forest-Mafia Coalition, an alliance of
Indonesian civil society organizations, and Forest Trends, a Washington-based
non-governmental organization, found a yawning gap between the legal supply of
wood to mills — as reported by the Ministry of Forestry — and the output
declared by the industrial forestry sector.
The study,
Indonesia’s Legal Timber Supply Gap and Implications for Expansion of Milling Capacity, said raw material used by these mills exceeded the legal supply by
the equivalent of 20 million cubic meters.
The report
said although the source of the wood was unclear, it is likely to have come
from trees chopped down during clearfelling for plantations of palm oil and
acacia trees, which are harvested by the pulp and paper industry.
Indonesia
is the world’s largest producer of palm oil.
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