Lust for Teak Takes Grim Toll

Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc
June 25, 2001
By Edward A; Gargan; ASIA CORRESPONDENT

Bangsri, Indonesia-The last of central Java's great teakwood forests ends up in places like this, a place filled with the whine of buzz saws and the burr of electric sanders, a place like Abdul Jambari's garden-furniture workshop.

"This is for export," Jambari says, stroking the finely polished arm of an auburn-grained folding chair. "It's the best teak, what we call class A." And because his order book is full, a month or two from now, for about $100, Jambari's chair will sit on a patio or deck somewhere in the United States or Europe.

But that chair and the 4,000 others that are part of Jambari's latest export shipment have left behind a swath of utter devastation, one of thousands that afflict this archipelago and spell the end of the majestic forests that once blanketed Indonesia. Their disappearance also means the extinction of innumerable animal and plant species indigenous to this country.

"We are facing a cataclysm," said Togu Manurung, the director of Forest Watch Indonesia, an environmental organization that documents the destruction of the country's forests. "That is not an exaggeration. Our forests are disappearing faster now than under Suharto. It is worse than any time in Indonesia's history."

The tropical forests of Indonesia, one-tenth of the world's total, have fallen victim in part to the virtual collapse of political authority in this southeast Asian nation of a thousand islands and more than 200 million people, the fourth-largest population in the world. The toppling three years ago of the regime of President Suharto, a close U.S. ally whose three-decade rule often ruthlessly imposed order, has been followed by widespread violent upheaval, including multiple secessionist movements. In this chaotic atmosphere, illegal logging has gone unchecked.

In an unpublished report on the state of Indonesia's forests, the World Bank found that all the lowland forests in one of the country's largest islands, Sumatra ("forest that is usually the richest source of timber and which carries the highest biodiversity") will be extinct before 2005, and in Kalimantan, the island formerly known as Borneo, by 2010. Swamp forests, according to the report, will disappear five years later. In the past decade, the rate of Indonesia's deforestation has accelerated from 2.47 million acres annually, to 4.2 million acres.

Based on an analysis of satellite photos of Indonesia's forests, the report, written by Derek Holmes, a consultant to the World Bank, and made available to Newsday, contends that unless the government acts immediately to stop rampant illegal logging, "the only extensive forests that will remain in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi in the second decade of the new millennium will be the low stature forests of the mountains."

For people like Manurung, there is little evidence that the government, in disarray over the impending impeachment of President Abdurrahman Wahid and beset by waves of bloody sectarian and ethnic conflict, is capable of slowing the destruction of the forests.

"Illegal logging is going on everywhere," he said. "Lots of people are involved. Lots of these people have connections - high-ranking officials, members of parliament, the army, police, local officials."

Even national parks are being logged at a frenetic pace. On Kalimantan, the Tanjung Puting National Park, designated by the United Nations as a "Biosphere Reserve," a term bestowed on lands of exceptional plant and animal diversity, is being systematically and illegally logged, according to reports by Forest Watch and another environmental group, Telepak Indonesia, as well as Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops.

Suripto, the secretary general of the forestry ministry (like many Indonesians, he goes by only one name) charged last year that lumber companies and sawmills owned by a member of parliament were illegally processing ramin logs, the most valuable tree in the national park whose blond, straight-grained wood is used extensively in furniture, wood moldings, blinds and pool cues. Despite his findings, which followed an extensive investigation, the logging has continued and the member of parliament, Abdul Raysid, remains untouched by the law. He did not respond to repeated messages left at his office at the Tanjung Lingga Group, his logging and lumber-processing company.

So extensive is Raysid's influence in the area that the first chairman of a commission intended to oversee the management and conservation of the Tanjung Puting National Park was Raysid's brother.

"You must understand that people like Raysid are like Robin Hood in their localities," said Manurung, of Forest Watch. "They put a lot of money into their communities and they have a lot of support from local people. So when government investigators, or investigators from groups like ours, go to the park to check on logging, there are gangs that try to intimidate us. Some people have been beaten up."

Most of the timber plundered from the national park and from Indonesia's other forests winds up in China or Europe, as well as the United States, according to environmental groups here.

Here in Bangsri, a nub of land protruding from the northern rim of central Java, local officials maintain that a breakdown of law and authority has fueled the surge in illegal logging, and with it, the end of the forests here.

A battered macadam road, two lane, meanders over hills and into valleys, past scrub land, tentative fields of corn and vast scars of rust-colored earth. Everywhere, stumps of what were once towering teak trees pepper the landscape, giving the appearance of an immense parchment written in braille.

"In 1999, this was all forest," said Rahmat Wijaya, the district manager for the state logging company, Perhutani, his hand sweeping across a barren vista stretching toward distant hills. "That year, thousands of people came and cut down the trees, local people and people from outside, both. The last tree was taken in November 2000. There was nothing we could do."

Private logging was not permitted in Bangsri, Wijaya said, only managed logging by the state company. But Suharto was compelled by mass protests to step down in May 1998, and with him went the authoritarian regime that had kept everyone in line. Under Suharto, logging was big business, but it was a business confined to the president's cronies, particularly Mohamad "Bob" Hasan, who was granted the most extensive logging concessions in the country. Hasan is now in prison for corruption, and the collapse of the Suharto regime was soon followed by a huge upsurge in illegal logging.

"Due to the reform era," said Wijaya, referring to the post-Suharto government of President Wahid, "the police and army are powerless to do anything. There is a huge logging mafia that came here and cut all the trees. All of this land belongs to the state company, but there was nothing we could do. They came with trucks and chainsaws. Now, we have no more natural teakwood forests."

In Indonesia, a country bathed in corruption, there is a special word used to describe theft on a truly massive scale: "penjarahan."

"It is penjarahan," Wijaya said of the unchecked clear cutting. "Everything was taken."

In one field, he pointed to motley rows of 4-foot-high broad-leaf teak saplings. "We have never tried to re-plant teak trees before," he explained, "but we are trying now. This is the first time. It takes 60 years to grow a teak tree. I will not be here when these are grown, if they survive."

Not far from where the teak forests used to be, H.M. Sugito sat, somewhat disconsolately, on a massive mahogany log at his lumber yard. "It's true," he said, surveying piles of teak logs and a scattering of 8-foot-long mahogany tree trunks. "We have no more forests here. They're all gone. So now, I have to get my logs from elsewhere, from other places in Indonesia."

Asked if the teak logs in his roadside yard were legally cut, he shrugged. "When people bring logs here, we buy them," he said, a price list for his logs dangling from his fingers. "Why ask questions?" At his yard, a teak log slightly over 6 feet long and a foot in diameter sells for $290; the huge mahogany logs, 8 feet long and nearly 3 feet in width, go for $445.

Some of those logs find their way to Abdul Jambari's furniture shop and to dozens like it scattered over this peninsula. "I've been making chairs for eight years," he said, scrutinizing a newly finished slat-backed chair that was carried from the open-air workshop. "I guess about 75 percent of these are for export, to the United States, Australia, Europe, 17 countries in all."

And the teak? "We get teak from dealers," he said. "They have logs, and we buy them. I can't say where they come from."

To Manurung of Forest Watch, such practices explain why his country's forests are vanishing. "You have to remember that the total capacity of the wood processing industry and the pulp and paper processing industry is 80 million cubic meters," said. "Legal logging produces 17 million cubic meters. So you can see that there is a huge gap between supply and demand. And that gap is made up from illegal logging."

Sipping iced tea in the restaurant during a break from lobbying officials at the forestry ministry, he held out little hope. "This country is on the brink of disintegration," he said. "This country is on the brink of bankruptcy. How are we ever going to protect our forests?"