Erwida Maulia Jakarta Globe 18 May 15;
Tags: Deforestation, deforestation moratorium, Environment Ministry, Greenpeace Indonesia, Indonesia environment, walhi
Razed land in the Tesso Nilo National Park, an ostensibly protected forest area in Sumatra’s Riau province. (Antara Photo/F.B. Anggoro)
Jakarta. Activists have criticized a presidential decree issued last week that extends Indonesia’s moratorium on new logging and plantation permits, saying it once again fails to offer strong law enforcement measures to ensure implementation and protect the country’s waning forests.
President Joko Widodo last week signed the new decree extending the deforestation moratorium, which was first introduced by his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in May 2011.
The original moratorium expired in May 2013, but Yudhoyono extended it for another two years, before Joko signed another two-year extension last Wednesday.
Environmental activists, albeit welcoming the extension, lament the president’s failure to fortify the regulation.
“The government’s move of extending the forest moratorium deserves appreciation,” Greenpeace Indonesia forest campaigner Yuyun Indrayadi wrote on a blog post published on the NGO’s website.
“It is very regrettable, however, that the only thing changing from the previous moratorium is only [the decree’s] number and the period of validity. We’ve found no clauses whatsoever on stronger [law enforcement] and protection in the forest moratorium that will be in place through 2017.”
As many as 63.8 million hectares of Indonesian forests are included in the moratorium, meaning that logging should be strictly prohibited in the areas.
Yuyun, though, said the moratorium only covered old-growth forests and peatlands that remain free of concessions and are listed as state-owned forests by the Environment and Forestry Ministry.
Some of the forests that fall under the jurisdiction of local administrations are not included in the policy, and so are secondary forests and some primary forests that somehow have been given concessions that Yuyun thinks should also be rescued with the moratorium.
In total, 93.6 million hectares of forests should be protected under the moratorium, Yuyun said.
Law enforcement issues aside, Greenpeace estimates that as much as 48.5 million hectares of forests are facing deforestation threats because of the Indonesian government’s failure to identify all forests which need to be safeguarded.
Activists had campaigned for stronger deforestation moratorium months before the previous one expired last week, noting weak law enforcement and poor evaluation of implementation by the Yudhoyono administration.
In 2012, a year after the ban was first imposed, Indonesia surpassed Brazil’s rate of deforestation, becoming the fastest forest-clearing nation in the world, according to a study published last year in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Indonesian Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya had talked with NGOs as they voiced their recommendations for stronger enforcement.
Arief Yuwono, the deputy minister for environment degradation control and climate change, also earlier said that several issues needed to be addressed before the new moratorium draft could be finalized — including law enforcement, synchronization with other related, existing regulations and the one-map reference issue.
Overlapping maps of concessions, community forests and protected forests have been identified as among the causes of problems in implementation of the deforestation ban by the previous administration.
It looks as though the government’s plan is to just extend the ban first, and perhaps revise the substance later.
“We’ve gathered recommendations from ministry officials and NGOs. But we need more detailed discussions [in order to strengthen the moratorium],” Siti said in Jakarta on Monday, according to newspaper Indopos.
Another Greenpeace activist, Teguh Surya, questioned Siti’s promise for more deliberations.
“The statement from the Environment and Forestry Ministry [...] offers hope for a stronger moratorium,” Teguh said.
“But the timetable remains unclear, when exactly can the moratorium be strengthened, while forested areas not included in the moratorium will remain prone to destruction. Strengthening the moratorium urgently needs to be done.”
Zenzi Suhadi, a forest campaigner at the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), took note of revisions, which are allowed every six months, for areas covered by the moratorium under the new decree, but expressed concern that these would be vulnerable to abuses.
“The evaluations available every six months should not be used to revise the maps but to enforce the law, against evil scenarios and practices by corporations and some government officials conspiring to legitimize their deeds through concessions,” Zenzi said.
He scrutinized the ban’s exclusion of forest clearance in areas under the “principal concessions,” with which plantation companies can operate as long as they participate in safeguarding protected forests near their areas, as well as the exclusion of deforestation to grow rice and sugar cane.
“Land grabbing by corporates these days is being conducted on behalf of food and energy resilience [...] Large-scale sugar cane plantations and rice fields will become the new cause of deforestation in Papua, Maluku and South Sumatra,” Zenzi said.
On the other hand, he added, the moratorium fails to exclude small-scale uses of people’s forests by local people.
“One of the worst points of the presidential decree is its tendency to hamper the implementation of the president’s own commitment to allocating 12.7 million hectares for people’s forests,” he said.
