Yudhoyono inherited a political class, a bureaucracy, and a business private sector largely impervious to all these concerns. The Indonesian constitution put “the land, the waters and the natural resources” of the country under the powers of the state, to be used for the greatest benefit of all the people. One of Suharto’s earliest laws, in 1967, put all forests more specifically under state control. Over following years, he replaced the customary leadership of communities with a top-down system of appointments, from provincial governor to village head. Customary tenure of forests was thus pushed aside, along with the local representation that might have pursued ownership and land-use rights.
In 1982 the New Order mapped the 75 percent of the Indonesian land area classed as forest. Out of 144 million hectares, it marked 64.3 million as “production” forests. By then, as we have seen, the military had been given control over the allocation of forestry concessions and was collecting a large percentage from concessionaires. Suharto’s business cronies, such as Bob Hasan, had made vast fortunes from the export of unprocessed logs and then cornered the production of plywood. In 1990 they were the leaders among nearly 600 concessionaires holding long-term leases over 60 million hectares of tropical forest.
In 1996 the ageing Suharto embarked on a new project aimed at maintaining his prized achievement of rice self-sufficiency. A “Mega Rice Project” in the Kapuas region of Central Kalimantan saw drainage canals cut through a million hectares of swampy peat land and forest, drying them out. The scheme pushed aside Dayak communities that relied on the shifting cultivation of open ground and collection of rattan vines for furniture making. By the next year, the peat was oxidizing and emitting huge volumes of carbon dioxide, and combusting as fires spread into the ground from the burning of tree cover. Similar land-clearance programs were underway elsewhere. The 1997 haze originated from fires in twenty-three provinces. The Mega Rice Project was one of the follies stopped during the economic bailout of 1998. By then, though, about one-third of Indonesia’s forest cover had been lost during the New Order period.
The process worsened in the years after Suharto resigned, as the New Order was reformed. Power shifted back from the central government to local authorities and a resurgent civil society. It was almost anarchy. Customary groups reasserted their rights to forest land, sometimes in conflict with other groups. Dayak communities expelled many of the settlers transplanted from Java and Madura under the Suharto government’s transmigrasi program, which had aimed to export a rice-growing culture to the outer islands as well as to relieve population pressures. The Habibie government’s law on regional autonomy gave the kabupaten the authority to “manage natural resources.”
That same year, 1998, a new forestry law, replacing Suharto’s 1967 law, reaffirmed the authority of the central Ministry of Forests over access to forests, allocation of land, and use of forest resources. But district governments went on issuing hundreds of logging concessions. In many cases, local officials brokered partnerships between the existing big timber companies and the communities who had been granted the new leases. The annual rate of deforestation doubled from 1 million hectares in 1999 to 2 million by 2003.
The scale of illegal logging—illegal as far as Jakarta was concerned, if not local authorities—was revealed in a series of raids by the national police in 2008. They seized nineteen ships at one small port, Ketapang in West Kalimantan, which were loaded with 12,000 logs of tropical hardwood for which there were no papers of origin. Another 32,000 logs were found being floated down the wide Kapuas River. This seizure in a short space of time suggested an extractive industry earning about $3.5 billion a year. Further sizeable shipments of hardwood came in other parts of Kalimantan, while smaller loads of high-value sandalwood and blackwood were intercepted in the eastern islands. But there was another industry that would mount an even bigger threat to Indonesia’s natural forests.
In the early part of the twentieth century, planters cleared large areas of forest in what are now Indonesia and Malaysia for the bioresource of the new motoring age, rubber, from seedlings smuggled out of South America. In recent decades, however, a new kind of tree imported from West Africa and South America has transformed the landscape again in these two countries.
Palm oil is a staple ingredient of the packaged foods, toiletries, and cosmetics of the supermarket era: from bread and cookies to frozen chips, chocolate, lipstick, shampoo, and shaving cream. The palm grows in marginal soils under tropical sun and with high rainfall; within five years it yields heavy bunches of the reddish-yellow fruit from which the oil is extracted, which fetches up to $1,250 a ton at market peaks. With yields of up to four tons per hectare from a mature tree, the crop can be a valuable earner for a smallholder.
Many governments from Africa to the Southwest Pacific encouraged the development of smallholder plots, grouped around nucleus estates and processing plants, to spread the cash economy to their villagers. Yet the crop also offers a double benefit to the big timber companies: after getting an early profit from the large trees they clear on their concessions, they can replant the land with this quick-return tree crop instead of setting it aside for the decades required for forest regrowth. Consequently, Indonesia has seen some of its biggest conglomerates diversify from timber or pulp and paper production into palm oil, while many groups in completely unrelated fields have also taken over or developed plantations.
Indonesia’s production of palm oil grew from less than 200,000 tons in the 1960s to about 27 million tons in 2013. It exported about 18 million tons of crude palm oil in 2012, earning $21.6 billion—and the government reaped $5.7 billion in export tax. With the trade balance and government budget squeezed by the rising net imports of petroleum, the government raised the mandatory proportion of biodiesel in subsidized fuel in 2013 and is promoting the extension of palm-oil plantations in Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua. Production is expected to rise to about 40 million tons a year by 2020.
The spread of palm-oil plantations threatens the livelihood of communities that live off the natural forests, especially where adat (customary) forms of ownership are unrecognized. In Sumatra, the oil palm threatens the survival of various animal species, including a rhinoceros and a sub-breed of tiger; in Kalimantan, the orangutan. The shrinking of the natural forest and replacement with monotonous lines of oil palm, the exclusion of traditional human communities, and the vanishing wildlife also reduce opportunities for forms of specialist tourism that might generate rewarding local employment. In 2005 the new Yudhoyono government encouraged an initiative that aimed to end the cutting of old-growth forest. Some of the bigger plantations joined a voluntary system known as “Certified Sustainable Palm Oil,” which gave a label to oil that was produced according to certain environmental and social standards, and not from newly cleared land. For expanded planting, the industry was pointed toward an estimated 20 million hectares that had already been cleared in previous logging operations and was lying unused.
In 2011 Yudhoyono imposed a two-year moratorium on new forest exploitation permits and extended it for another two years in 2013. In theory, this set aside 64 million hectares of natural forest, while the government fine-tuned an ambitious new-age scheme to keep the forests and peatlands and make money out of them. Called the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program (abbreviated to REDD+), the UN-sponsored scheme sees developing countries compensated if they preserve their carbon sinks, such as forests and swamps.
Jakarta embraced the idea with enthusiasm. In 2008 one group of environmentalists saw it earning between $2.5 billion and $4 billion a year. The government’s council on climate change estimated it could bring in $15 billion a year by 2030. Foreign governments, including those of Norway and Australia, were among the aid donors that made pledges totaling $4 billion to get it started. In 2009, at a meeting of the Group of Twenty in Pittsburgh, Yudhoyono pledged to reduce Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent by 2020;
even a 41 percent reduction was possible, he said, with enough international support. Dozens of pilot schemes got underway, many of which saw entrepreneurs from the big cities putting themselves and their organizational skills between the residents of the forest and the central government, and taking some of the money flows.
In 2013, after six years of the REDD+ scheme, not a single carbon credit had been sold from Indonesia, notes one scholar, Abbie Carla Yunita. The Australian aid agency pulled out of the scheme it had been supporting in Kalimantan, while out of the $1 billion pledged by Norway, only $50 million had been disbursed. In many schemes, the question of who held the tenure of the land had not been resolved. With that being unclear, the ownership of the carbon rights was also uncertain.
The government was slow in producing a map of which forest areas must be protected and which might be exploited. The powerful Ministry of Forests chopped and changed the classification. One important area for a REDD+ scheme, the Katingan Peatland Restoration and Conservation Project, in Central Kalimantan, had its area cut in half from 203,000 hectares in 2013, making it unviable as a habitat for its estimated 4,000-strong orangutan population, on which ecotourism and other ventures depended. Logging and palm-oil companies went ahead clearing land under licenses given before Yudhoyono’s moratorium in 2011.
In 2013 it was estimated that a further 5 million hectares of forest had been cleared since the president’s announcement. Civil society groups were questioning the self-certification processes of the sustainable palm-oil scheme, arguing that certifiers selected and paid by the companies were glossing over practices that the scheme was supposed to eliminate. Only about 35 percent of palm-oil production was covered by the scheme; those outside it had no trouble finding buyers.
Some local communities, or at least local exploiters, have resisted restoration schemes for devastated lands. The canals that had drained the peatlands have become waterways and are sometimes used to transport timber cut in small sawmills. Remedying the land means blocking these canals so that water soaks into the land and raises the water table closer to the surface. In 2013 the actor Harrison Ford came to Indonesia to front a documentary film on deforestation; he was horrified at the land clearing that was happening within the boundaries of national parks, including the vast Tesso Nilo lowland park in Riau province, home of a dwindling band of Sumatran wild elephants. Encroachments have taken about one-third of its area, with seventeen companies and 584 small cultivators growing palm oil for sale to mills located around the park’s periphery, according to a World Wildlife Fund report in mid-2013. In mid-2014, an authoritative study by a former senior Indonesian forestry official Belinda Arunarwati Margono and colleagues at South Dakota University found that the rate of deforestation was increasing and was twice the rate reported by the government. Some 6 million hectares of primary forest was cleared between 2000 and 2012, the rate of clearance rising by 47,600 ha a year. In 2012, Indonesia lost 840,000 ha of forest, compared with 460,000 ha cleared in Brazil (where the jungle area is four times greater).
In June 2013 the annual haze set in again severely. Satellites picked up dozens of “hot spots” in Sumatra from fires set to clear land, despite a total ban by Jakarta on this method. Singapore declared a “very hazardous” level of air pollution from smoke particles. Recriminations broke out between Indonesia and Singapore and Malaysia, though it emerged that some of the plantation companies accused of encouraging land clearances by fire were domiciled in these neighboring countries.
The picture is a familiar one: good intentions and policies at the top undermined by a lack of enforcement capacity on the ground and by the corruption of the agencies supposed to monitor and guard the forests. Still, the approach cannot be written off. Government agencies are working on a uniform map to delineate which forests are protected and are developing a protocol for “free, prior, and informed consent” by local communities. In May 2013 the constitutional court ruled on an appeal by indigenous community support groups that “customary forests” could no longer be classified as state forests. Potentially, this provides a legal basis for about 40 million people to regain control over their traditional lands. Yudhoyono’s government worked on timber certification agreements with the European Union and other markets, although illegal timber still leaked out to China through Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.
The slow start to the REDD+ scheme might turn out to be a blessing. Had the global carbon market really taken off before ownership of the carbon rights were sorted, the outer islands of Indonesia might have seen another rush of land-grabbing by big corporations and the politically connected. But collecting and distributing compensation from the international market will not be enough, warns a well-known writer on the environment, Chandra Kirana. Indigenous communities will need to be engaged in exploiting their forests in sustainable ways: by setting up ecotourism ventures, by taking some high-value timber for specific products, and by harvesting foods, spices, beverages, and fibers.
Palm oil and other plantation crops are not the only threat to the forest cover. Across Kalimantan, as we have seen, the coal-mining industry has scarred the landscape with open-cut pits and access roads. Samarinda, the capital of East Kalimantan, is ringed by seventy mines and depleted workings filled with acidic water. Only in a minority of the 12,000 coal-mining concessions across Indonesia are attempts made to restore land.
The collection of revenue by regional governments is opaque. Rather than an unforeseen by-product of political decentralization, this was the result of a conscious policy to have a fragmented coal industry that allowed easy entry by new domestic entrepreneurs and that kept out the big international mining companies. In a revealing remark, a senior official at the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources told the American embassy in December 2007 (in a reference to the 35-million-tons-a-year Kaltim Prima Coal): “There will be no more KPCs.” The Indonesian government preferred ten companies producing 5 million tons a year than one producing 50 million. The official shrugged off the loss of revenue and environmental protection this would involve. “Indonesia would be better off if we had kept mining large-scale,” says environmentalist Chandra Kirana. “In the name of nationalism we have actually thrown away our resources for the benefit of a very few.”
An even smaller-scale mining boom is also having adverse effects. Across the islands, up to 3 million people are estimated to be making a living from sluicing alluvial sands for gold without any permits or supervision. Often they strip forest to get to the layer of gold-bearing sands underneath. Close to the giant Freeport mine in Papua, thousands of “illegal” miners sift through discarded rock for gold traces. Typically, these small miners mix mercury into their slurry, where it amalgamates with the gold. Officially, Indonesia imported only 7.9 tons of mercury in 2011 for industrial and medical use. One estimate, using export figures from trade partners, put the actual import level around that time at 280 tons a year. The mercury would have been smuggled from Malaysia and Singapore and paid for from the proceedings of the gold that was smuggled out. Miners or gold dealers would then use blowtorches to vaporize the mercury from the globules of amalgam. The result is extremely high concentrations of mercury in the bodies of the miners and people living nearby, in the river fish on which many inland communities depend, and in the marine life chain downriver and out to sea. Sometimes cyanide is used to help dissolve the mercury, resulting in the methyl mercury that caused the Minamata poisoning in Japan. The combination of uncontrolled deforestation and mercury contamination is particularly severe on local livelihoods in the western side of Kalimantan, which has no coal reserves to compensate for falling forestry employment and rising health problems.
For the majority of Indonesians, however, these problems are out in the jungles and islands. In 1977 the economist Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, then Suharto’s minister for research, saw an “island-city” in the making on Java and Madura. Indonesia’s population was then 142 million, which he believed wo
uld rise to 250 million by the end of the twentieth century. Population growth was slower than Sumitro predicted, thanks in part to the New Order’s family-planning program. By 2013, it was still just under 250 million; demographers see it rising to 290 million by midcentury, before the ageing profile and decline seen in other Southeast Asian countries sets in. Still, it remains the fourth-most populous country in the world, and 58 percent of its people live on Java and Madura. That is, about 145 million live on a land area only slightly larger than that of New York State, or 60 percent of the area of Australia’s state of Victoria.
About 53 percent of Indonesians now live in urban environments. That may have stopped or slowed the clearing of Java’s remaining forest cover, which has been all too evident in the rising incidence of rainy-season flooding and dry-season droughts in recent decades, caused by the felling of trees in the watersheds for timber and firewood or open land for planting. As we have seen, the process is being reversed in some areas, notably with the planting of teak along the barren Gunung Kidul range, southeast of Yogyakarta. More and more inhabitants now live in the cities along the Java Sea coast, where dwellings are made of industrial materials and household energy comes from a grid or a gas canister. Java remains a remarkably green and beautiful landscape, but more and more of the rice paddies on its urban fringes are being turned over to housing and factories.
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