| Author: Charles Victor Barber, Emily Matthews, David Brown, Timothy H. Brown, Lisa Curran, Catherine Plume |
| Year published: 2002 |
| Research focus: Sustainable Development, Environmental Policy |
| Keywords: Forests, Biodiversity, World Resources Institute, Indonesia, Governance |
| Abstract: ndonesia is endowed with some of the most extensive and biologically diverse tropical forests in the world. Tens of millions of Indonesians depend directly on these forests for their livelihoods, whether gathering forest products for their daily needs or working in the wood-processing sectors of the economy. The forests are home to an abundance of flora and fauna unmatched in any country of comparable size. Even today, almost every ecological expedition that sets out to explore Indonesia's tropical forests returns with discoveries of new species. But a tragedy is unfolding in Indonesia. The country now finds itself the unwelcome center of world attention, as domestic and international outrage mounts over the rampant destruction of a great natural resource. Indonesia'seconomic miracleof the 1980s and 1990s turns out to have been based, in part, on ecological devastation and abuse of local people's rights and customs. For example, one of the country's fastest growing sectors, the pulp and paper industry, has not established the plantations necessary to provide a secure supply of pulpwood. Instead, pulpmills rely largely on wholesale clearing of natural forest. The economy is plagued by lawlessness and corruption. Illegal logging has been rampant for years and is believed to have destroyed some 10 million ha of forest. Indonesia's wood-processing industries operate in a strange legal twilight, in which major companies that -- until the economic crisis of 1997 - attracted billions of dollars in Western investment, obtain more than half their wood supplies from illegal sources. Wood is routinely smuggled across the border to neighboring countries, costing the Indonesian government millions of dollars in lost revenues each year. |
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