12 - Illegal Logging in Indonesia: Myth and Reality

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Illegal logging has emerged as a critical issue in debate on Indonesia's forest policy and as a key environmental concern. People have long known that Indonesia's forestry sector has been affected by organisational and operational irregularities for much of its history. However, the fall of Soeharto's New Order regime in 1998 enabled these problems to be discussed more openly.

Criticism of illegal logging in Indonesia initially spanned a range of crosscutting sectoral issues. They included abuses associated with large-scale concession- based logging; industrial overcapacity; clear-cutting for plantation estates; problems resulting from the activities of cartel-like timber extraction and trade associations; and small-scale community-based timber extraction. However, there has been a gradual shift in the government and general public perception of what is wrong with Indonesia's forests.

In this chapter, I use the generally accepted definition of illegal logging as any activity associated with timber extraction or processing that contravenes existing forestry regulations – for example, overcutting, cutting outside authorised blocks, underreporting of production, manipulation of documents or bribery (Contreras-Hermosilla 2001; ITTO 2001; FWI–GFW 2002). While the government, the media and NGOs generally agree with this definition of the term ‘illegal logging’, they tend to single out small and medium-sized logging operations based on district-level permits and cross-border smuggling and identify them as the essence of the illegal logging problem in Indonesia. Such perceptions seriously affect the outcome of measures currently in effect to oppose illegal logging. In particular, law enforcement agencies assume that small and medium-sized logging operations are the main perpetrators of illegal logging and target them without looking at the issue more broadly.