Manuela Saragosa – Indonesia has the world's second largest reserves of natural forest but the World Bank has warned it could all disappear within the next decade.
Critics say the country's forests have been exploited with little regard for their sustainability as a valuable resource.
Industries which depend on the forests have been singled out for blame, and pulp and paper companies in particular have come under heavy criticism. Overseas buyers of Indonesian paper have started to take note.
The environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth says imports to Europe have dropped about 50% so far this year.
Accusations
The Lontar Papyrus mill is just one of many pulp and paper companies in Sumatra. Sumatra is also home to APP and APRIL, two of the world's largest producers.
Critics say that over the past decade these companies have built up huge capacity without planning a long-term sustainable supply of wood. Rather, they have relied on government licences to cut down existing forest.
In the process they have become closely associated with the problems that plague Indonesia's forestry sector. They have been accused of illegal logging and of provoking land disputes with local communities.
Convincing the critics I was invited to join a conference call at the Jakarta offices of APP where Mark Werren, the company's forestry manager, explained what they were doing to address those criticisms.
Like its competitor APRIL, APP plans to source all its wood from its own planted forests within the next eight years. The problem is they are having a hard time convincing critics they can do that in such a short space of time.
Chris Barr, the industry expert at the UN-affiliated Centre for International Forestry Research in Bogor, outside Jakarta, described the targets as extremely ambitious.
"Until they are able to demonstrate that they are able to raise their planting area by that kind of increment then there are certainly some concerns about whether they are going to be able to meet those targets," he said.
Creating a definition
APP and APRIL say they will clear cut and convert only the forests that have already been partially cut down – what they call degraded forest.
But Jim Jarvie, a Jakarta-based forestry expert, says such degraded forests could still be valuable.
"The whole thing about the word degraded is that it is a continuum, it just means not pristine," he said. "It has got no qualifier, no threshold for how ... degraded is so impossibly degraded it can't come back.
"Yet the pulp and paper industries make a definition, use that and go forward with it. There's no accountability towards what sort of forest they are clearing out."
Gaining credibility
Aris Adhianto works for Indonesia's Sinar Mas group, a conglomerate whose owners also control APP. He is pioneering a scheme in Sumatra which involves getting local communities to manage and grow plantation forests for the pulp and paper companies.
This way the companies hope to avoid land disputes and gain access to the territory they need in order to become self-sufficient. As an incentive to join the scheme communities are given small crops or fish farms. But such schemes have met with scepticism among pressure groups.
To gain credibility APRIL, another pulp and paper producer, has contracted a third party which includes a non-governmental organisation, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, to conduct an independent audit of its wood purchase practices.
Illegal logging
Meanwhile, though, time is running out for much of Sumatra's remaining natural forest. A drive along Sumatra's roads with Aris Adhianto put the scale of the problem into perspective. I saw quite a few trucks come by, piled high with logs but with no markings on the logs which means they are illegal.
Illegal logging has played a huge role in deforestation in Indonesia and as long as these sorts of problems abound, the country's pulp and paper companies will find it difficult to avoid being tarred with the same brush.