Vaudine England, Jakarta – The pillaging of the nation's forests has increased dramatically since the fall of former president Suharto and within 10 years the remaining trees will be gone, a report published yesterday warns.

"If the current state of resource anarchy continues, the lowland forests of the Sunda Shelf, the richest forests on Earth, will be destroyed by 2005 on Sumatra and 2010 on Kalimantan," say four experts in the latest issue of the US Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Paul Jepson, James Jarvie, Kathy MacKinnon and Kathryn Monk all have extensive experience of Indonesia's resource management efforts over several decades. They made a special trip to the main areas at risk in December.

"Twenty years ago, Indonesia used the best principles of conservation biology to plan a national protected area system based on representativeness, irreplaceability, complementarity and connectivity," the experts said. "Today, Indonesia is a society in transition, torn apart by economic and political crises and the gap between scientific best practice and the reality of current forest mismanagement could hardly be wider." The fate of Indonesia's vanishing forests came to the world's attention in 1997 and 1998 when raging fires started by farmers on land cleared of trees sent a pall of smog over much of Southeast Asia. Soldiers were eventually called in to help extinguish the flames.

The causes of the destruction are to be found in the Suharto era's corruption and the former president's penchant for giving away forest concessions to key friends and allies. Local residents in forested areas were disenfranchised and prevented from carrying out traditional forest-tending practices.

Since then, the state's collapsing security and judicial systems have made abuses even more rampant. Political reforms such as new regional autonomy laws are, in many places, accelerating the losses because local authorities are unable or unwilling to resist the temptation of quick money. In some areas, such as the Gunung Leuser National Park in north Sumatra, the report notes, local communities have been forced by fear and lack of options to sign over their land titles to illegal logging gangs. This practice is heightened by the continuing confusion over what land rights they actually have.

"After Suharto's fall from power, the interim government of president Habibie [1998-99] passed two pieces of legislation that were vague about the extent of regional autonomy for resource planning and management," the authors said. "In December 2000, we visited protected areas and forest concessions in Sumatra and Kalimantan. We found a rapidly deteriorating situation compared to just six months previously."

At stake is not just global biodiversity and local environmental needs, but tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid. The World Bank-funded project in the million-hectare Kerinci-Seblat National Park in Sumatra has already been judged comprehensively "unsatisfactory" by Bank supervision teams, a designation which is a precursor to possible funding cuts. A national park should be a protected area, but such places in Indonesia are currently offering warm welcomes to illegal loggers.

World Bank country director Mark Baird says the key problem is the lack of law enforcement. Despite numerous pledges, the Indonesian Government has failed to successfully prosecute a single company or person for illegal logging and the setting of fires to clear land.

"What is still missing in the thinking of government agencies is an awareness of the human resources to hand," an international forestry expert said.

He cited the example of one community on the eastern island of Lombok which succeeded in intercepting both the illegal loggers and the contraband logs being taken from their area.

But when they applied to local officials for action and personal protection, it became clear that a member of the Ministry of Forestry was a major beneficiary, and no action was taken.

"There is still the tendency to write off local communities as threats rather than vital partners. And there's the total anarchy you see in these areas. Everyone will try to grab what they can, regardless," said the experts.