Jakarta – Government officials, police and observers are calling for effective coordination among the police, Forestry Ministry and related departments to fight illegal logging.
"Coordination is easier said than done," Indonesian Forestry Community executive director Agung Nugroho told a seminar Tuesday on institutional empowerment and improving coordination to fight illegal logging.
He said Indonesia had a clear legal basis for fighting illegal logging in a 2005 presidential instruction.
"Unfortunately this legal basis is interpreted differently by different people," he said, adding that all stakeholders related to the forestry industry must become familiar with all the laws related to the sector so they are not working at odds against illegal logging.
Currently, Indonesia has 120.35 million hectares of forest, putting it behind only Brazil and Zaire in terms of tropical forest cover. The illegal logging and timber trade is causing the country to lose up to 1.8 million hectares of its forests each year, costing the state about Rp 45 trillion (US$4.8 billion) annually.
"That is five times more than the state budget for health," said Yayat Afianto, coordinator for forestry campaigns at Telapak, a non-governmental organization dealing with forestry matters.
He said that despite the massive nature of the problem, not one of the main actors behind the illegal logging and timber trade had been arrested. "Up to January 2007 only 13 cases out of hundreds had been successfully tried, but all of them resulted in sentences of only two years at the most," he said.
According to police data, there are currently 846 ongoing illegal logging cases throughout Indonesia, involving 920 suspects. Yayat said police could only touch the people at the very bottom of the illegal logging trade, the ones involved in actually felling and transporting the trees.
An investigator at National Police Headquarters, Adj. Sr. Comr. Agus Santoso, acknowledged it was difficult for police to catch the main actors. "The main actors have become smarter in covering their tracks, we can only find someone else's faces covering them up," he said.
He added investigations into illegal logging cases were often hampered by a lack of personnel. "The area of forest to be covered is much larger than the number of police investigators, and we also lack facilities," he said.
He added that most people living near forests depended on the timber industry for their living. "Most of them refuse to cooperate with us when we carry out an investigation," he said, adding that people should realize that illegal logging is everybody's enemy.
Yayat said illegal logging had become international in nature, run by organized crime syndicates. "So there is no use for us to point our fingers at each other. It is time for us to cooperate more intensively," he said.
Director for forest investigation and conservation at the Forestry Ministry, Auria Ibrahim, said illegal logging could not be handled by any one department, so the ministry was now expanding its cooperation not only with national institutions, but also bilaterally, regionally and multilaterally.
"We are also trying to improve the capacity of the forestry police by carrying out workshops and establishing special units for emergencies, as well as building the capacity of official state investigators," he said.