Jakarta Globe 22 Feb 15;
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.
