Efforts to stem or halt the rapid disappearance of Indonesia's rich and sprawling forests are stumbling in the face of weak law enforcement in this vast and corruption-prone archipelago.
The government has banned log and woodchip exports to protect its dwindling forests and proposed setting up a court to prosecute environmental looters, a move it says will reduce illegal logging and protect the local timber trade.
But environmentalists warn unless law enforcers are determined to take strong action against businessmen and officials responsible for the destruction of forests, there may be devastating consequences.
This will be one of the major topics that will arise at the UN Earth Summit, to be held in Johannesburg from August 26 to September 4.
A mounting onslaught of illegal logging, poor forestry surveillance, legal uncertainties and a crippling economic crisis have prompted conservationists to warn that Indonesia's forests may disappear within five to 15 years.
"The ban on log exports helps, especially in terms of monitoring timber movements," said Arbi Valentino of Indonesia's Telapak conservation group.
"But it should be followed up by serious efforts to prosecute people behind illegal logging. Unfortunately what is now lacking is serious action," Valentino told AFP.
He said many of those arrested for stealing timber were released or even if their cases went to court, they received light sentences. The financers and their backers are never caught. "Action is taken only against the workers," he said.
Suprayitno, head of the Indonesian forestry ministry's legal affairs department, said government measures were bearing some fruit but admitted weak widespread corruption involving civilians and the military remained a problem.
"You know those financers are very powerful financially. Many of our security personnel and officials are protecting them," he told AFP.
He said forest rangers, police, port officials and judges were also prone to bribes, in a system that has become "a vicious, very complicated cycle." Environment Minister Nabiel Makarim, who has also blamed corrupt and incompetent law enforcers for the rampant deforestation, has proposed a special court to deal with violations of the environment law.
A recent report by the World Resources Institute, Global Forest Watch, and Forest Watch Indonesia says corruption and lawlessness had fuelled an epidemic of illegal logging in Indonesia, doubling the country's deforestation rates in the late 1990s.
During the rule of former dictator Suharto, the government took control of forests and dispensed huge tracts for his family and cronies to exploit.
The report said Indonesia is now losing nearly two million hectares of forest annually – an area half the size of Switzerland – up from one million hectares in the 1980s. Forest cover fell from 162 million hectares in 1950 to only 98 million hectares in 2000.
The country's richest forests, in the lowlands of the island of Sulawesi, are almost entirely gone and will disappear in 2005 from Sumatra and in 2010 in Kalimantan, it said.