The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Business | Wed, October 16 2013
In a bid to make forest monitoring much easier, the government has planned to revise a regulation that will limit ownership of forest concessions to 40,000 hectares (ha) per permit in one province.
The revision will also cap the ownership of forest areas by companies at 80,000 ha nationwide.
Forestry Ministry secretary general Hadi Daryanto said the 40,000-ha regulation will apply to businesses who want to renew their concessions and those who want to get a new contract.
Hadi said that he hoped the revision of the 2007 government regulation on forest management, currently in preparation, would be completed as soon as possible and could become effective early next year.
The ownership limitation, according to Hadi, is mainly for security reasons, particularly to prevent forest fires, illegal logging and forest pillaging.
Currently, forest rangers do not have the adequate resources to monitor and safeguard forest areas from threats.
The revision is also formulated to fit the 1999 Law on forestry, which stipulates that permits for forest concessions should be limited to maintain “fairness, equity and sustainability”.
“The revised regulation will be effective for new permits. However, it will also be imposed on existing forest concessionaires that want to renew their expiring permits,” Hadi explained.
According to the regulation, a permit for a production forest is effective for five years.
He said that currently, there was no limit on how many hectares of forest areas a company is allowed to develop.
A 1999 government regulation had previously stated that a company was only allowed to develop 100,000 ha of forest per permit and was restricted to only 400,000 ha of forest areas across the country – before it was annulled by the 2007 regulation.
Hadi said that the spirit of the ongoing revision was to revert to the 1999 law, although the areas would be adjusted to 40,000 ha due to the aforementioned security reasons.
He said that officials at the ministry had decided on 40,000 ha after they considered the fact that a concessionaire was usually guarded by two units of forest police, which consisted of four forest rangers each.
A forest ranger can supervise 5,000 ha of forest areas to protect the areas from fires and illicit activities.
Association of Indonesian Forest Concessionaires (APHI) executive director Purwadi said that in capping the number of hectares for forest area permits, the government should look into the economic scale and objective of each permit.
“An industrial forest, for instance, has its own economic scale as it has to supply craft, pulp and paper industries,” he said.
When asked what the maximum number of hectares should be granted for a concession permit, Purwadi said his association was currently evaluating and calculating the figure.
Indonesia’s forests have often been engulfed by fires, mostly due to illegal land clearing and natural causes such as extreme droughts. The most recent high profile forest fires occurred in the middle of the year in Riau, which sent thick smoke into the neighboring city state, Singapore.
The country also has a history of rampant illegal logging, particularly in the early 2000s, with deforestation rates reaching 3.5 million ha per year during that period.
To combat deforestation and reduce greenhouse gases, Indonesia has extended a two-year moratorium set to halt the commercial use of a total 65.2 million ha of primary forests and peatlands.
The moratorium was set through a 2011 Presidential Instruction and had expired in May before it was extended later that month.
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