Illegal Logging Surges in Indonesia’s Aceh

The rebels of Aceh are trading their guns for chain saws, cashing in on a logging binge that is jeopardizing the future of the world’s third-largest tropical forest reserves.

It’s a cruel conjunction of good news and bad news: The rebellion is over, but peace has opened virgin forests, previously inaccessible, to illegal logging. With 130,000 homes destroyed by the tsunami of December 2004, demand for timber is almost insatiable.

“Everyone is getting into the logging business,” says Taydin, 25, who spent five years fighting the Indonesian army in Aceh’s jungles on the island of Sumatra.

When a peace deal was reached last year, Taydin found himself unemployed and desperate for cash. So he joined dozens of other former rebels who are cutting down prized 100-year-old Meranti and Semantuk trees.

He has no permit to cut wood, he says, and bribes police to let him transport it to the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. “People have no work, so selling the wood is a good way to make money,” said Taydin, who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name.

Indonesia, whose tropical forest reserves are the world’s largest after the Amazon and the Congo basin, has lost about 40% of its canopy to loggers in the last 50 years.

At this rate of deforestation -- an area the size of New Jersey lost each year -- lowland trees of Sumatra and the neighboring island of Borneo will disappear by 2010, say Friends of the Earth and the World Wide Fund for Nature, or WWF.

Aceh was largely protected during a decades-long separatist insurgency, with logging mostly limited to rebels and rogue elements within the military.

Since the tsunami, demand for timber has risen sharply, but commercial logging has been banned in Aceh since 2001. Local and international aid groups that rushed here are in a bind, having to balance the need to build quickly against their duty to use legal timber.

Several have been caught buying from illegal sources; others have had to redesign homes to use less wood or delay construction as they seek legitimate supplies.

Most have turned to other parts of Indonesia for lumber, a strategy criticized by the WWF since up to 70% of Indonesia’s timber is protected. It says agencies instead should import wood, but only four have done so.

“They talk about respecting environmental values and ensuring long-term effectiveness of their projects,” said Ralph Ashton of the WWF, which has donated two shipments of imported timber and is sending a third this month. “But a lot of agencies are getting timber from unsustainable sources.”

Some logging occurs in Aceh’s Leuser and Ulu Masen ecosystems, which have some of the richest rain forests in Southeast Asia and are home to many endangered animals, including rhinos, elephants, tigers and orangutans.

If the practice continues, “animals will lose their habitat and we expect to see increased conflict between humans and wildlife,” said Ilarius Wibisono, whose group, Fauna & Flora International, monitors the 1.85 million-acre Ulu Masen forest.

The coastal village of Lhoong is typical of the transformation taking places in many mountain hamlets, where villagers have joined former rebels in illegal logging, sometimes with the tacit approval of local authorities. Men load timber they admit is illegal into trucks.

Leuser International Foundation, in a report this year, said at least 120,000 metric tons of illegal Leuser logs were trucked to the port city of Medan in 2005. Some were then transported across Sumatra to the coast and sold to aid groups, it said.

Among those accused of using illegal wood to build homes or fishing boats is a Turkish organization, International Brotherhood and Solidarity Assn., which said it did so unwittingly, and Medecins Sans Frontieres Belgium.

“We got timber from a supplier whom we thought was kosher,” MSF Belgium’s Erwin Vantland said.

“In all honesty, in that emergency we didn’t have the resources to determine where the supplier would get the wood from,” he said. “When we were told that some of the wood was potentially from illegal logging, we were already quite far into the boat project.”

International aid agencies say compliance can be difficult, given that timber documents are sometimes forged and officials bribed.

Complicating matters further, few aid groups have experts on staff to navigate the Indonesian system and inspect mills to make sure their suppliers are legal, especially when they are rushing to alleviate a disaster.

CARE International said it stopped buying from Aceh in May and has suspended construction of 1,400 homes because it hasn’t found a legitimate supplier outside the province.

“The international community has to be pragmatic,” CARE’s Rossella Bartoloni said. Legal timber sources are essential, she said, “But we can’t allow the lack of one construction material to stop communities from starting their new lives.”