Indo Forest

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THE STATE O. THE .OREST: INDONESIA

Indonesias 17,000 islands span the Indomalayanand Australasian realms; the archipelago containsseven major biogeographic realmsand an extraordi-nary diversity of habitat types. (See Box 1.1.) Manyislands have been isolated for millennia, so levels ofendemism are high. Of 429 locally endemic birdspecies, for example, 251 are unique to singleislands. Most of Indonesias insects are also foundnowhere else, with many genera confined to indi-vidual mountaintops. The countrys three maincenters of species richness are Irian Jaya (highspecies richness and endemism), Kalimantan (highspecies richness, moderate endemism), andSulawesi (moderate species richness, high ende-mism).

Indonesia provides the habitat for some of the

worlds most beloved mammals, including theorangutan, tiger, rhinoceros, and elephant. Asrecently as 1930, three subspecies of tiger, Balinese,Javan, and Sumatran, ranged across the country. Ofthese three, the Balinese tiger (Panthera tigrisbalica) became extinct in the late 1930s and theJavan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica) in the 1970s.Today, only the Sumatran subspecies remains.Because of their solitary lifestyle and nocturnalhabits, an accurate census of Sumatran tigers isnearly impossible. They are believed to number

around 400-500, living mostly in five national parkson Sumatra. An informal census in 1978 estimatedthe number of tigers on the island at approximately1,000. Despite tigers ability to live in a wide rangeof habitats, forest fragmentation and agriculturaldevelopment as well as the demand for tigerproducts have contributed to the decline of thepopulation (Tiger Information Center, 2001).

Other mammal species are not faring much better.The Sumatran and Javan rhinoceros are both onthe World Conservation Unions (IUCN) Red List

of critically endangered species. The Javan rhinoc-eros (Rhinoceros sondaicus) is the rarest largemammal species in the world, with an estimated

54-60 individuals in 1995, most of them in a singleprotected area, Ujung Kulon National Park. The

Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) isknown to exist on the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra,and Borneo. In all populations, rhino numbershave declined more than 50 percent over the past

decade. Only about 400 rhinos are known to existin Indonesia.

Habitat fragmentation and conversion have also hitprimate species particularly hard. The PrimateSpecialist Group of IUCN has recently designated 2

species, the Sumatran orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus)and the Javan gibbon (Hylobates moloch), among its

top 25 most endangered primates. The Javan gibbonnumbers between 300 and 400 in the scant remainingforest of Java. On Sumatra, orangutans are foundonly in the provinces of Aceh, North Sumatra, and

Box 11 The Wallace Line

species were Asian in origin, whereas east of Bali

they seemed to have come from Australia. This

stunning separation of species is one of the primary

sources of Indonesias incredible biodiversity. Infact, the isolation of Indonesias wide archipelago,

which spans over 4,800 km, is what has created

such a diverse range of species. Indonesia ranks

among the top five countries in the world in its

diversity of plants, mammals, birds, and reptiles

(CI, 2001).

References

Conservation International. 2001. Online at:

http://www.conservation.org (January 9, 2001).Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1859. On the Zoological

Geography of the Malay Archipelago (S53, 1859).Paper presented to the Linnean Society on 3 November

and published in theirZoological Proceedings in 1860.

The Indonesian archipelago is split almost in half by

an invisible line. The English biologist Alfred Russel

Wallace first described this line in the 1850s

(Wallace, 1859). Wallace observed that birds presenton one island were not present on another island only

40 km away. He later found that this startling pattern

was true when applied to countless other animal and

plant species. For example, the famous dipterocarp

trees that make up the bulk of lowland forests in

Indonesia show a remarkable divide across the

Wallace line. Over 287 species are found on Borneo,

whereas only 7 are found 80 km eastward on

Sulawesi, at the same latitude. The line, which now

bears Alfred Wallaces name, is created by a deep-sea

shelf that cuts between Bali and Lombok, and north

between the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi. Few

species found on one side of Wallaces line are found

on the other. Wallace speculated that west of Bali,


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!THE STATE O. THE .OREST: INDONESIA

West Sumatra. As with most endangered mammals,habitat loss and fragmentation are the key causes ofpopulation decline. However, hunting for food andsport, the illegal pet trade, and management ineffec-tiveness in the national parks have also contributed topopulation declines (IUCN, 2001).

13 People Also Depend on the.orests

A large though undetermined number of communi-ties live in or depend on Indonesias forests. Esti-mates made over the past several decades havevaried wildly on the precise number of people

from 1.5 million to 65 milliondepending ondefinitions used and the policy agenda pursued

(Zerner, 1992:4).

Nontimber .orest Products

In mid-2000, the Ministry of Forestry1 reported that30 million people depend directly on the forestrysector for their livelihoods, but did not define thedegree of dependency (MOF, 2000). Many of thesepeople live by traditional portfolio economicstrategies that combine shifting cultivation of riceand other food crops with fishing, hunting, harvest-

ing and selling of timber, and gathering nontimberforest products (NTFPs) such as rattan, honey, andresins for use and sale. The cultivation of coffee,rubber, and other tree crops is also an importantsource of income (De Beer and McDermott,

1996:74). One particularly valuable nontimberforest product is rattan cane. Indonesia dominates

world rattan trade; its abundant supply of wild and

cultivated rattan accounts for 80-90 percent ofglobal supply (FAO, 2001:4).

Millions of people use forest plants and herbsknown for their medicinal properties. Medicinalplants and other nontimber forest products arepoorly appreciated and difficult to documentbecause many of them are not reflected in formalmarket transactions recorded in economic statistics.The total value of exports ofwildlife and plants

for the 1999-2000 fiscal year was more than $1.5billion, according to the Ministry of Forestry, butthe components of this aggregated total are notspecified (MOF, 2000). Nonmarket use values arealso likely to be high: if each of the estimated 30million forest-dependent people used forest prod-ucts worth only $100 each year, their total value

would be $3 billion.

Environmental Services

The range of benefits provided by Indonesiasforests extends far beyond forest products. Morethan 16 million people live in the countrys 15largest watersheds. Their forests help protectfreshwater supplies by stabilizing soil on hillslopesand regulating the speed and timing of river flow.Yet these watersheds lost more than 20 percent of

their forest cover between 1985 and 1997.

Indonesias forests also store great quantities ofcarbon. According to the FAO, forest vegetation inIndonesia totals over 14 billion tons of biomass

more than any other country in Asia and equal toabout 20 percent of the biomass in all of Africas

tropical forests. This quantity of biomass stores,

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" THE STATE O. THE .OREST: INDONESIA

roughly, about 3.5 billion tons of carbon.2 Given theextensive forest clearance in Indonesia and the

relatively small area that has been replanted (seeChapter 3), it appears likely that land cover changeshave created a net source of carbon in recentdecades, thus contributing to global warming.

Environmental services are hard to quantify. Muchanecdotal evidence exists and many local studies

confirm that ecological functions have declined withdeforestation, but consistent information at the

national scale is lacking. The importance of envi-ronmental services being lost is still harder to

evaluate in dollar terms. Scholars have attempted toassign economic value to environmental goods andservices that are not exchanged in recognizedmarkets. Using a variety of assumptions andmethodological approaches, researchers haveascribed values to tropical forests ranging fromhundreds to thousands of dollars per ha. One suchstudy by the Forestry Department of Bogor Agricul-tural Institute (IPB) in Java concluded that the

theoretical economic value of biodiversity andcarbon storage dwarfs the revenues currentlyobtained from roundwood production (BogorAgricultural Institute, 1999).

While such studies are not robust enough to be takentoo literally,3 they provide a useful reminder thatconventional appraisals of forest value, based ontimber prices, are too narrow and they neglect theinterests of local forest dependent people. They alsoneglect the interest and concern of people worldwidewho care about the fate of Indonesias forests. Manypeople respond to tropical forests with a sense ofawe, excitement, and reverence. It may be arguedthat monetary valuation techniques are not alwaysrelevant and that the spiritual and aesthetic qualitiesof Indonesias forests lie beyond the reach of both

mainstream and ecological economics.

14 Timber Products Are a MajorSource of National Revenue

Indonesia is a significant producer of tropicalhardwood logs and sawnwood, plywood and otherboards, and pulp for papermaking. More than halfthe countrys forests, some 54 million hectares, areallocated for timber production (although not all are

being actively logged), and a further 2 million ha ofindustrial wood plantations have been established,supplying mostly pulpwood. The volume and valueof Indonesian wood production are hard to deter-mine with precision: data provided by FAO, the

International Tropical Timber Organization, and theIndonesian government are compiled differently and

do not tally. The majority of Indonesian woodproduction is used domestically and domestic prices

MAHACALAUNHALU

are generally much lower than international marketprices. Nevertheless, the importance of the forestrysector to the Indonesian economy is clear. In 1997,the forestry and wood processing sectors accountedfor 3.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP),and exports of plywood, pulp, and paper werevalued at $5.5 billion. This amount was nearly halfthe value of oil and gas exports, and equal to nearly10 percent of total export earnings. (See Table 1.1.)

The forestry sector shared in the tremendous growthand export drive of the economy in the 1980s and1990s, but this expansion was achieved at the costof wholly unsustainable forestry practices. Thewood processing industries in Indonesia nowrequire about 80 million m3 of wood annually tofeed sawmills, plywood manufacturing plants, pulp

mills, and papermaking plants. This quantity ofwood is far more than can be produced legally fromthe countrys forests and timber plantations. As aresult, more than half the countrys wood supply isobtained from illegal logging.

15 Assessing the State of the.orest

Only a century ago, Indonesia was still densely

forested, with trees covering an estimated 80-95percent of the total land area, depending on theisland being considered. Total forest cover at thattime has been estimated at about 170 million ha.Today it is approximately 98 million hectares, at

least half of which is believed to be degraded byhuman activity. The rate of deforestation is acceler-

ating: Indonesia lost about 17 percent of its forestsbetween 1985 and 1997 alone.On average, the


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country lost approximately 1 million ha of foresteach year in the 1980s and about 1.7 million ha peryear in the 1990s. Since 1996, deforestation appearsto have accelerated again to approximately 2 millionha per year. At this rate, virtually all of Indonesia slowland foreststhe most valuable for bothbiodiversity and timber resourceswill be gonewithin the next decade (Holmes, 2000).

The threats to Indonesias forest are numerous,ranging from large-scale logging operations tosmall-scale clearance by family farmers, from clear-cutting to make way for industrial agriculture todevastation by repeated fires. Illegal logging isundertaken at every level of society, by supposedlylegitimate timber groups, the military, corruptofficials, and wildcat operators. Yet despite the

importance of Indonesias forests, and the speed atwhich they are disappearing, accurate, up-to-dateinformation on forest extent and condition is eithernonexistent or hard to obtain. No integrated recordof forest area has been kept over the years, soinformation has to be pieced together from differentsources. On top of the practical difficulties, accessto Indonesian forestry data was hampered under theSuharto regime by government secrecy, industryintimidation, and bureaucratic obstruction. (See Box2.1 and Annex 1.)

The reformasi era that followed the fall of Suhartoin 1998 has encouraged a resurgence of interest andcritical investigation into the management of thecountrys affairs. Nongovernmental organizations(NGOs) and other civil society groups have beenprominent in pressing for the release of officialinformation and publicizing the results. As informa-tion emerges, the extent to which Indonesias

natural resourcesforests above allhave beenabused and wasted has become clear. The story isnow beginning to be told.

This report was prepared by Forest Watch Indonesia(based in Bogor, Indonesia) and Global ForestWatch (based in Washington DC, United States). Itspurpose is to provide a comprehensive informationsource on the state of Indonesias forests that willserve as a baseline for future reporting. The reportsuffers from all the imperfections of the informationsources: data are missing, often outdated, some-times conflicting. The exact extent and distributionof Indonesias forests still cannot be mapped,precise regional deforestation trends are not known,the biological condition of many forests is not wellstudied, and the operations of the countrys forest

industries remain secretive and are often illegal.Nonetheless, this report attempts to compile andharmonize the best of the official information that isavailable. It also includes information gathered inthe field by FWI staff and their colleagues in otherNGOs. We acknowledge the help and cooperationof some officials of the Ministry of Forestry whoprovided valuable new information on forestmanagement issues. When data sources conflict, weattempt to provide an explanation. Where data aremissing, we say so, and when we have conducted

our own analyses of forestry data, especiallyrelating to forest condition, we make this clear. It isour hope that as better information becomes avail-able, future State of the Forest reports will providean increasingly accurate and reliable resource forpolicymakers, environmental organizations, forestindustries, and all those who believe that betterinformation will lead to better decisionmaking.

Table 11 Indonesias LeadingExports, 1997


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16 Structure of the Report

Chapter 2 provides a summary of what is knownabout the current extent and distribution of forestcover, trends in deforestation, and the condition ofremaining forests. Chapter 3 examines the causes ofdeforestation through an analysis of the economic

activities affecting forests: logging under theconcession system, illegal logging, conversion offorests to industrial timber plantations or agricul-tural estates, and small-scale farming. Chapter 4documents the causes, scale, and impacts of forestfires over the past 25 years. Chapter 5 provides abrief summary of the current policy and institutionalenvironment, reviews the current national agendafor forest policy reform, and assesses the prospectsfor its implementation.

FWIPapua

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