Indonesian forests vanishing into paper - scientist
Date: 13-May-02
Country: SINGAPORE
Christoper Barr, policy scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), told reporters the industry now has the capacity to swallow 60-65 million cubic metres of wood each year, or three times as much as the estimated sustainable level.
Quoting a report by the World Bank, Barr warned low-land forests in Sumatra, home to some of the world's highest biodiversity levels, could be exhausted by 2005 unless something was done.
CIFOR, created in 1993 and based in Bogor near Jakarta, is one of the international research centres sponsored by World Bank and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
David Kaimowitz, director general of CIFOR, added Indonesian forests had shrunk to 95 million hectares (237.5 million acres) by 1997 from 120 million hectares (300 million acres) in just 12 years.
Barr said the industry, including troubled giants Asia Pulp & Paper Co Ltd (APP), assumed wrongly they had access to an unlimited supply of cheap wood from Sumatra's natural forest and pulp wood plantations.
"The financial problems of APP...and other major producers in Indonesia over the last couple of years suggests that (the) Indonesian paper and pulp industry was a speculative bubble," Barr said."
Though APP and Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Ltd (APRIL) - another major pulp and paper firm - announced plans to source all woods from sustainably managed plantations by 2007 and 2009, they involved clearing large areas of natural forests, particularly swamp forests, Barr said.
In addition, it is questionable if the industry, bogged down by debts of around $20 billion, had funds for such investment. It is also increasingly forced to turn to district authorities that were more interested in collecting quick cash, he said.
The paper and pulp sector alone has cleared as much as one million hectars (2.5 million acres) of natural forest over the past 10 years to get 120 million cubic metres (yards) of wood, Barr said. About 90 percent of the wood supply came from natural forests.