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Indonesia Forestry
Seventy-five percent of Indonesia's total land area of
191
million hectares was classified as forest land, and
tropical rain
forests made up the vast majority of forest cover,
particularly in
Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Irian Jaya. Estimates of the rate
of
forest depletion varied but ranged from 700,000 to more
than 1
million hectares per year during the mid-1980s. In a
critical
evaluation of Indonesian forestry policy, economist
Malcolm Gillis
argued that deforestation could not be blamed on a single
major
factor but was instead due to a complicated interplay
among
commercial logging, Transmigration Program activities, and
shifting
or swidden cultivation, still practiced largely on
Kalimantan.
Gillis argued that the most immediate threat to
Indonesia's forests
was the government promotion of domestic timber
processing, whereas
the Transmigration Program was the greatest long-term
threat.
The government had ownership rights to all natural
forest, as
provided for in the 1945 constitution
(see The Constitutional Framework
, ch. 4). Ownership could be temporarily
reassigned in the
form of timber concessions, known as Forest Exploitation
Rights
(Hak Pengusahaan Hutan), or permanently transferred, as in
the case
of land titles granted to transmigration families. The
average
concession size was 98,000 hectares, and the usual
duration was
twenty years. Foreign timber concessions were curtailed to
conserve
resources in the 1970s, and by the 1980s, of more than 500
active
forest concessions, only 9 were operated by foreign firms.
Log
production peaked in 1979 at 25 million cubic meters, of
which
about 18 million cubic meters were exported as unprocessed
logs.
Restrictions on unprocessed exports in the early 1980s
contributed
to a decline in total log production, which fell to 13
million tons
in 1982. However, increasing demand for sawn timber and
plywood
began to boost production again, bringing it up to 26
million cubic
meters by 1987. In that year, about half of total log
production
was exported in the form of sawn timber and plywood, the
rest going
into domestic consumption. Log production again dropped at
the end
of the 1980s, falling to 20 million cubic meters by 1989.
The
government attributed this decline to policies designed to
preserve
the natural forest. One such policy was the increase in a
levy
imposed on loggers for reforestation, which was raised
from US$4 to
US$7 for every cubic meter of cut log.
Data as of November 1992
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