Corruption and poor law enforcement has led to a spate of illegal logging in Indonesia, resulting in one of the highest rates of tropical forest loss in the world, warns a new report released last Wednesday.

Deforestation rates in the biologically rich Asian archipelago have doubled in the late 1990s, with the country losing nearly two million hectares of forest every year, according to Bogor-based Forest Watch Indonesia, and the Global Forest Watch project of Washington-based World Resources Institute.

''Deforestation on this scale, at this speed, is unprecedented,'' said Emily Matthews, co-author of the report, 'The state of the forest: Indonesia'.

Forest cover fell from 162 million hectares in 1950 to only 98 million hectares in 2000. The country's most biologically rich forests, known as lowland forests, were almost entirely gone on the island of Sulawesi, says the study, which is based on new detailed satellite mapping.

All forest will disappear from Sumatra in 2005 and from Kalimantan in 2010, the 104-page report predicts.

''Our findings do not provide grounds for much optimism,'' said Togu Manurung, director of Forest Watch Indonesia.

Cronyism and corruption

Scientists consider Indonesia' forests — the third largest area of contiguous tropical forest in the world — among the Earth's most diverse and biologically rich. While the country comprises only 1.3 percent of the planet's land surface, it holds a disproportionately high share of its biodiversity, including 11 percent of the world's plant species, 10 percent of mammal species, and 16 percent of bird species.

According to the report, increasing deforestation in recent years is largely the result of corruption, lawlessness, illegal logging, political instability and over-expansion of forests industries. Political instability has been a particular concern since the 1997 market crash and 1998 ouster of President Suharto.

Since then, the incidence of illegal logging and farming in national parks — including Central Sulawesi's Lore Lindu National Park, Central Kalimantan's Tanjung Putting National Park, and Aceh's Leuser National Park — has increased.

Suharto had awarded logging concessions covering more than half the country's total forest area. Many were granted to his relatives and political allies. As a result, 10 companies came to control 45 percent of all logging concessions in the country.

''Cronyism in the forestry sector left timber companies free to operate with little regard for long- term sustainability,'' said Matthews.

More deforestation from autonomy

Massive expansion in the plywood, pulp, and paper industries over the last 20 years has led to a demand for wood fibre that exceeded legal supplies by as much as 40 million cu m annually, she added.

The report estimates that 65 percent of the supply in 2000 came from illegal sources. According to the Ministry of Forestry, legal timber supplies from natural forests declined from 17 million cu m in 1995 to less than eight million cu m in 2000.

The government's industrial timber plantation programme and the system of converting forests into plantations further drove deforestation. Nearly nine million hectares of land, most of it natural forest, had been allocated for industrial timber plantations by 1997. While most of it has been cleared, only two million hectares have been re-planted.

Indonesia's rapid move to a new system of regional autonomy could cause further deforestation, according to the report, since provincial and district administrations do not have the funds or capacity to govern effectively.

The 1999 revised forestry law gave district heads the right to hand out 100-hectare logging licences, and they have given out hundreds in some areas, despite an October 2000 order by the Minster of Forestry to stop the practice, according the report, citing Tempo , Indonesia's leading news magazine. Every time a licence is issued between US$5,000 and US$10,000 finds its way into regional coffers, said Tempo .

''Raising short-term revenue will be a top priority,'' the report states, ''and as a result, intensified exploitation of forest resources is already occurring in many regions.''

Grim prognosis

Pressure has been applied by international aid donors to reform the country's forestry policy, but these efforts have had limited success.

Under pressure from the Consultative Group on Indonesia, a group of international donor and creditor institutions chaired by the World Bank, Indonesia committed to 12 forest policy reform actions in 2000. But in April 2001, Marzuki Usman, the newly installed forestry minister, admitted the country had failed to meet those commitments.

''Given the overwhelming political, social, and economic problems that Indonesia faces and the near-complete absence of action on any forest policy reform agenda item over the past few years, the prognosis for Indonesia's forests remains grim,'' according to the report. — IPS