Saving Papua's rainforest is a hero's job

Marianne Kearney, Today Online 24 Jan 08;
Governor of Papua has an uphill task battling exploitative interests

Making his dream come true could be a nightmare but Mr Barnabas Suebu, the Governor of Papua — home to the most dense jungle in Indonesia, where stone-age warriors live among the most bio-diverse region in the planet — wants to preserve huge swathes of rainforest.

In fact, he wants to preserve 7 million ha — about 110 times Singapore's land mass.

Papua's forests have been carved up by Chinese, South Korean, Malaysian and local companies, and much of the logging is done illegally. Local companies then launder the logs and sell them at an astounding rate, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency, which has been monitoring Papua's logging since 2002.

Greenpeace estimates that every hour, three football fields of forest are logged in Indonesia. In Papua, home to 42 million ha of forest, an estimated 7.2 million m3 of timber, much of it prized hardwood merbau, is being logged each year.

But Mr Suebu said almost none of this vast natural wealth and rapid exploitation has benefited local people. Papua is still one of Indonesia's most impoverished provinces, with 40 per cent of the 2.5 million people living on less than 50 US cents (72 cents) a day, according to the World Bank.

"The benefit for the local people is trivial but the impact is devastating. There is no benefit at all in plundering the forests," Mr Suebu told reporters, during the Bali climate change conference.

"A timber log is priced at US$10, but the price can climb to more than US$10,000 after being processed into wooden goods," he said, referring to an entire hardwood tree trunk. The governor said he has banned the export of unprocessed logs and will also ban the export of unprocessed palm oil. He said he plans to begin enforcing this proposal in January, regardless of the province's lack of palm oil processing plants, and any viable furniture or wood processing industry.

He has also signed a decree with his counterpart, the Governor of West Papua, agreeing to a moratorium on deforestation in the vast jungles covering the whole of the western and Indonesian part of Guinea Island.

In return, Papua is hoping to earn millions of dollars in carbon credits if First World countries eventually agree to pay forest-rich countries for not cutting down their trees. Mr Suebu and many environmental lobbyists were disappointed that the United Nations and countries attending the Climate Change Conference in Bali in December last year could not agree on a system that would reward countries for preserving their forests.

However, his environmental adviser, Ms Maria Latumahina, said the governor is confident that such a system will be agreed on by next year, when world leaders will meet again to hammer out an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol before it expires in 2012.

In the meantime, the governor is working towards being able to trade its preserved forests on the voluntary global carbon market, where international companies have already begun buying up carbon credits — or preserved tracts of land — in order to give their companies some green kudos, said Ms Latumahina.

This also means drafting a raft of implementing regulations and a system to ensure any timber or timber product which leaves Papua is properly certified as sustainably harvested. Mr Suebu also wants to work out how to develop a forestry policy which can alleviate poverty.

Logging companies quickly persuaded traditional owners to sell off their logging rights for a song — leaving the Papuans landless and, pretty quickly, penniless. Unaware of the huge premium that merbau hardwood fetches on the international market, some tribal leaders sold their rights for as little as a few bags of rice.

But it is not the stone-aged warriors who will pose a problem for Mr Suebu's ambitious scheme but the modern ones; mainly the well-financed timber barons and those backing them. The military has been heavily involved for years in Papua's logging business, either directly as part of local companies or indirectly acting as "agents".

Mr Suebu, who was named Time magazine's environmental hero in a special issue last year, admitted he has a huge task on his hands. "I feel like I've been named a hero without going into the battlefield. The war is just about to start," he told reporters at the Bali conference.