JOINT ACTION TO TACKLE IIIEGAL LOGGING

Joint Action to Tackle Illegal Logging

Indonesia is losing 2 million hectares of forest – an area the size of Wales – each year, and if current trends continue, all lowland production forest in Sumatra and Kalimantan could be gone by 2010. An estimated two-thirds of the annual harvest is illegal. Corruption, poor law enforcement, confusion about forest laws and rural poverty all contribute to this catastrophic state of affairs. But illegal logging is not just a domestic problem which Indonesians can sort out on their own. Much of the timber is exported, and consumer countries also have a role to play.

This is why the governments of Indonesia and the UK signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on illegal logging in 2002. An independent review suggests that the MoU, a £1.5 million sub-programme of MFP, has made a significant contribution to a range of processes designed to tackle the trade in illegal timber.

Until recently, there has been no clear definition of legality, making it difficult for the authorities and the courts to prosecute offenders. The MoU has been instrumental in establishing a new legality standard. A series of public consultations led to a draft definition which was field-tested by The Nature Conservancy, and later by Lembaga Ecolabel Indonesia (LEI), a local timber certification body.

“One of the great strengths of the legal standard,” suggests Agus Setyarso, director of the MoU programme, “is that once it was passed on to LEI to develop, it had an Indonesian institutional home.” The definition should make it easier for the European Union and Indonesia to design a Voluntary Partnership Agreement which will help reduced the trade in illegal timber. The MoU also recognised the role civil society can play, and it funded the Konsortium of Anti-illegal Logging (KAIL), a partnership of NGOs in West Kalimantan. KAIL has convinced the authorities that they should target the big players – the cukong – rather than villagers who are frequently forced by poverty to do the dirty work of getting illegal timber out of the forests, and KAIL’s case-tracking investigations have helped to put some prominent cukong behind bars.

The MoU has also helped the Ministry of Forestry to draft a new law on combating illegal logging, and it part-funded a series of mill audits which led to UK buyers cancelling contracts with Indonesian suppliers who were found to be using illegal timber. The industry-led Timber Trade Action Plan – one of six EU initiatives designed to keep illegal timber out of Europe – was a direct outcome of this. The MoU has also stimulated a range of other countries, including Japan, a major destination for illegal Indonesian wood products, to sign bilateral agreements to tackle illegal logging.The reviewers highlighted the opportunities that now exist to link community forestry to efforts to tackle illegal logging – working not only with the stick (law enforcement), but providing carrots too, in the form of incentives for many small-scale forestry enterprises to engage in legitimate forestry operations, thus giving them a stake in the sustainable future of the forests.Bottom of Form

Multistakeholder Forestry Programme

The program objectives are to strengthen government and civil society partnerships at local and national levels to build capacity, empower community forest managers and develop and implement policy. In particular, the program will work to nurture and strengthen its network of Community Foundations in the regions, established with previous program support. (Internet). February 4th, 2009

Penulis.Simon Arnold Julian Jacob