Indonesia: New permit policy ‘could increase deforestation’

Hans Nicholas Jong, The Jakarta Post 6 Oct 15;

The government has announced plans to reduce various forestry license application process times from two years to three to 15 days, raising concerns that the changes will speed up the rate of deforestation in the country, which has become the world’s fastest in the past decade.

The Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) said on Monday that the plan posed a huge risk to the country’s struggling natural environment.

“The risks are great because the current licensing system is already chaotic with overlapping permits. Just look at the never-ending forest fires in the country,” Walhi chairman Abetnego Tarigan said.

Abuse of forest permits has been blamed as one of the leading causes of annual forest fires in the country, and the government is currently trying to revoke concession permits for land or forest cleared by fire.

The government aims to simplify the application process to acquire licenses for the use of forest areas for mining, agroforestry and industrial forests. Currently, it takes from two to four years to acquire a forest conversion permit. The Environment and Forestry Ministry claims that the speeding up of the licensing process will not necessarily lead to deforestation.

“The process still has to go through the planning directorate-general. They are preparing the criteria that [applicants] will need to meet the land demand for development. So I don’t think we will violate our own commitment [to slow down deforestation],” the ministry’s climate change director-general Nur Masripatin said on Monday.

Togu Manurung, a professor at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB) and director of Forest Watch Indonesia (FWI), said that the government’s current way of managing the country’s forests was still seen as posing a huge risk to the environment.

“[The simplification of the licensing process] will speed up land conversion and increase the potential for land and forest fires if it’s still business-as-usual for the government, as forest fires continue to occur even though the problems are crystal clear,” he said.

According to Togu, the government still had to prove it had better forest management credentials before it could possibly ensure that the speeding up of the licensing process would not lead to deforestation.

“First, the government has to involve the public [in the licensing process]. All data has to be transparent to all stakeholders and the public who will be affected [by the forest permit issuance] must be given the chance to voice their disagreement. For example, notify indigenous people noticed that the plan has the potential to increase land conflicts,” he said.

Therefore, the government has to finish implementing its one-map policy, which was officially implemented at the end of 2014 to resolve disagreements resulting from the use of different data and maps that often caused land disputes and overlapping permits in plantation and mining operations.

“If the one map already exists, then it could be used as a filter to clarify [potential land conflicts],” said Togu. “It looks like the progress on the policy stopped after the Presidential Working Unit for the Supervision and Management of Development [UKP4] was disbanded.”

Nur made assurances that the government would be able to avoid land conflicts even though the mapping of customary lands made by indigenous communities had not been incorporated into the one-map policy as the ministry was currently mapping customary lands and said that there would be requirements in the licensing process to avoid overlapping permits.

Togu also suggested the government prioritize forest area that had been heavily degraded in order to reduce the number of trees that had to be cut down to convert the area.

“Of course it will lessen the cutting down of trees. This has to be done in order to prevent us from backtracking on our Intended National Determined Contribution [INDC], which will be presented at the Paris Climate Summit as we facilitate deforestation through the speeding up of forest licensing,” he said.

The stark difference in the length of days needed to process a permit has also been deemed as unrealistic as it is almost impossible to verify land ownership in remote areas like those in Papua.

“Not to mention when it turns out that there’s a tenurial problem and indigenous rights that have to be protected in the verification results,” Papua State University environmental study center head Charlie D. Heatubun said.


Govt’s new timber certification policy may lead to illegal logging
Hans Nicholas Jong and Khoirul Amin, The Jakarta Post 6 Oct 15;

The government and a number of business associations have agreed to move forward with a plan to relax regulations on environmentally friendly certification for downstream products of timber, raising concerns that the changes would promote illegal logging.

The Trade Ministry’s director for exports of agriculture and forestry products, Nurlaila Nur Muhammad, said on Monday that a number of ministries and various timber-related business associations had agreed to the Trade Ministry’s proposal on the revision of timber export requirements.

“In the next one or two days, we’ll issue a ministerial regulation revising previous regulations on timber export requirements,” she told The Jakarta Post.

The Trade Ministry, the Environment and Forestry Ministry, the Finance Ministry, the Office of the Coordinating Economic Minister and a number of business associations — such as the Indonesian Rattan Furniture and Craft Association (AMKRI) and the Indonesian Furniture Entrepreneurs Association (Asmindo) held a closed-door meeting at the Trade Ministry office on Monday to discuss the issue.

According to Nurlaila, parties in the meeting agreed to simplify procedures on ironwood exports and revoke requirements for timber legality verification system (SVLK) certification on 15 downstream products of timber, including furniture.

Nurlaila said that the revision aimed to help local timber producers export their products overseas.

The timber industry, especially small and medium furniture-makers and craft-producers, has pushed
for the SVLK certification to be optional, arguing that the requirement to obtain the certificates made it difficult for small and medium businesses to export their goods and thus it limited their access to the global market.

However, some have claimed that the SVLK actually provides Indonesian producers with greater access to the global market, as it guarantees buyers that wood and wood-based products are made in accordance with the law and are sourced in an environmentally friendly manner.

For instance, the EU, the destination for around 40 percent of Indonesian timber product exports, has been requesting timber exporting countries to apply environmentally friendly certification on their products, as demand for eco-friendly products from EU consumers has been on the rise.

The Indonesian government, which signed the voluntary partnership agreement on forest law enforcement (FLEGT-VPA) with the EU last year, was currently negotiating with the 28-member bloc to make Indonesian timber products exempt from due diligence. If the negotiation comes through, Indonesia will be the first country in the world to be exempted from the process, giving its timber products a huge advantage over products from other countries.

According to Zainuri Hasyim of the Indonesian Independent Forest Monitoring Network (JPIK), if the regulations are relaxed, all these efforts will be for nothing, and it will bring Indonesia back to the time when illegal logging was rampant,

“If this happens, then all the efforts to fix the image of Indonesia’s timber export all this time will be for nothing,” Zainuri said.

The planned relaxation of the regulation has already caused concerns in the EU, with a representative of the union demanding clarification on the matter, according to Multistakeholder Forestry Program (MFP) program director Smita Notosusanto.

MFP is a partnership program between the Indonesian government and the British government to support the reformation of forestry governance through SVKL.

The Environment and Forestry Ministry also lambasted the planned revision, saying that it constituted a major setback in the country’s attempts to combat rampant illegal logging.

“The Environment and Forestry Ministry’s stance is clear. The SVLK [should] still be implemented. It is a soft approach to stop the extraordinary crime of illegal logging that has robbed trillions of rupiah from this country and caused lots of trouble. Why are there Indonesians who don’t support the SVLK?” the ministry’s sustainable forest management director-general Ida Bagus Putera Parthama told the Post on Monday.