Indonesia's recovery takes toll on forests

By Michael Casey

updated 11:56 a.m. ET Aug. 7, 2006

LAM KABEUE, Indonesia - The rebels of Aceh are trading their guns for chain saws and cashing in on a logging binge that is jeopardizing the future of the world’s third largest tropical forest reserves.

It’s a cruel conjunction of good news and bad news: The rebellion is over, but peace has opened previously inaccessible virgin forests to illegal logging. Meanwhile, 130,000 homes destroyed by the tsunami of December 2004 need replacing, and demand for timber is almost insatiable.

“Everyone is getting into the logging business,” says Taydin, 25, who spent five years fighting a guerrilla war against the Indonesian army in Aceh’s jungles on the island of Sumatra.

When peace took hold last year, Taydin found himself unemployed and desperate for cash. So he joined dozens of other former rebels who are cutting down prized 100-year-old Meranti and Semantuk trees.

He says he has no permit to cut wood, and bribes police to let him transport it to the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. “People have no work, so selling the wood is a good way to make money,” said Taydin, who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name.

Indonesia, whose tropical forest reserves are the world’s largest after the Amazon and the Congo basin, has lost around 40 percent of its canopy to loggers in the last 50 years.

N.J.-size area lost each year
At this rate of deforestation — an area the size of New Jersey lost each year — lowland trees of Sumatra and the neighboring island of Borneo will disappear by 2010, according to Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF.

Aceh was largely protected during a decades-long separatist insurgency, with logging primarily limited to rebels and rogue elements within the military. But last year’s peace deal opened up previously inaccessible virgin forests.

Local and international aid groups that rushed here after the earthquake and tsunami are in a bind, having to balance the need to build quickly against their duty to use legal timber.

Several have been caught buying from illegal sources while others have had to redesign homes with less wood or delay construction while seeking legitimate supplies.

With commercial logging outlawed in Aceh since 2001, most have turned to other parts of Indonesia for lumber, a strategy criticized by the WWF since up to 70 percent of Indonesia timber is protected. It says agencies should import wood instead, but so far only four have done so.

Binsar Bakkara / AP A man cuts timber at an unregistered logging site in Aceh Besar, Indonesia, last month.

“They talk about respecting environmental values and ensuring long-term effectiveness of their projects,” said Ralph Ashton of the WWF, which has donated two shipments of imported timber, with a third due this month. “But a lot of agencies are getting timber from unsustainable sources.”

Some logging occurs in the Leuser and Ulu Masen ecosystems, which have some of the richest rain forests in Southeast Asia and are home to endangered rhinos, elephants, tigers and orangutans.

If the practice continues, “animals will lose their habitat and we expect to see increased conflict between humans and wildlife,” said Ilarius Wibisono, whose group, Fauna & Flora International, monitors the 1.85 million-acre Ulu Masen forest.

“It’s already happening,” he said. “We had one tiger killed by villagers in Montasik because it ate their livestock.”

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