China's appetite for timber fuels illegal logging

Illegal logging in Indonesia’s Papua province is rampant and much of the illicit wood is smuggled to China to feed the country’s voracious appetite for lumber, environmentalists said.

The illegal enterprise is run by international syndicates that stretch across Asia, according to a report released by the Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency and Indonesia’s Telapak environmental group.

The syndicates depend on corrupt police and military officers who often take huge bribes to allow heavily-laden boats to sail from Indonesian waters, forge deals with local communities to cut the timber and guard logging sites, the report said.

“Papua has become the main illegal logging hotspot in Indonesia,” said M Yayat Afianto of Telapak. “The communities of Papua are paid a pittance for trees taken from their land while timber dealers in Jakarta, Singapore and Hong Kong are banking huge profits.”

Indonesia took control of Papua from the Dutch in 1963 and formalised its sovereignty over the region with a stage-managed vote by about 1,000 community leaders in 1969.

The military plays a significant role in the province, where tens of thousands of troops been fighting a small, poorly armed separatist movement for the past four decades. About 100,000 Papuans – one-sixth of the population – are estimated to have died as a result of military operations in the region.

The province, formerly known as Irian Jaya, occupies the western half of New Guinea island.

Several logging syndicates have in recent months moved their operations from depleted forests in East Kalimantan province and Sumatra island to Papua, which environmentalists describe as one of the last “intact tropical forests” in Asia, the report said.

A cargo ship from Papua arrives weekly in the Chinese port of Zhang Jia Gang near Shanghai, the report said, adding that about 300,000 cubic meters of Merbau logs are smuggled out of the region each month.

Wood from Merbau trees, which is prized for its strength and durability, is used for flooring and outdoor furniture and can fetch more than €463 per cubic metre.

The smuggling continues despite a 2001 ban on exporting logs from Indonesia and an agreement between China and Indonesia to address the problem, the groups said in the report. They urged the two countries to step up law enforcement, seize illegal logs and imprison smugglers.

“Indonesia and China signed a formal agreement more than two years ago to co-operate in tackling the trade in illegal timber,” said Julian Newman of the Environmental Investigation Agency. “So far these words have not been matched by action. The smuggling of Merbau logs between Indonesia and China violates the laws of both countries so there is a clear basis for action.”

Illegal logging is common in Indonesia, which has extensive rain forests on the islands of Sumatra, Borneo and West Papua. Some environmental groups claim that nearly 90% of the timber cut in Indonesia is illegally harvested and that forests the size of Switzerland are lost each year.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has promised to crack down on the practice and in recent months authorities have arrested illegal loggers and seized log shipments. But environmentalists say these shipments were seized because smugglers refused to pay bribes or after competing smugglers paid police to make the arrests.