JAKARTA, Jan 22, 2003 – International aid donors led by the World Bank may, just may, put more pressure on Indonesia to reform its forestry policy. Management of Indonesia’s remaining forests is among the topics on the agenda of the 12th meeting of the 30-member Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) in Bali this week. Most donor countries, though themselves large-scale importers of timber products, have consistently slammed Indonesia’s environmental stance on sustainable resources.

Researchers predict the forests of Indonesia will be commercially ruined within ten years. But the lumber companies keep on logging, legally and illegally, with a little bit of help from the Indonesian army. From the air, the empty logged places are hardly noticeable. From the ground, it’s more apparent. The big giants of the forest are gone. In the forests of Indonesia’s lowlands, the only remaining trees are those with narrow trunks, and they are not worth logging.

China is protecting its own trees but has begun instead to devour Asia’s forests. Brook Larmer and Alexandra A. Seno report.

The ornate three-story palace just off the main road in Ruili, a boomtown on China’s southern border, is a monument to the plunder of Burma’s rain forests – and to China’s insatiable appetite for timber.

BOGOR, Indonesia Governments do not like to close down big businesses. But that is what international donors will probably demand of the Indonesian government at a meeting on Bali this Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss a new foreign aid package.

Sustainable forest management is one of the key items to be discussed by international donors and the Indonesian Government during this week’s meeting of the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI). At previous meetings the Indonesian Government promised to take strong measures to make companies manage forests more sustainably, in return for receiving new loans and grants.

INDONESIA’S giant forestry industry and some of the country’s largest forestry-related companies will come under the spotlight at the coming meeting of the Consultative Group on Indonesia under a proposal to downsize the industry. The proposal, which is supported by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, calls for a halt in the sale of loans and assets belonging to debt-strapped forestry companies totalling between US$1 billion and US$2 billion by the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency until the sector is restructured and licences held by non-cooperative companies revoked.

Foreign donors must ask the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA) to delay the sale of forestry companies at cheap prices because it would only lead to further deforestation, an environmental group said Wednesday. The sale of forestry companies linked to dissolved banks by IBRA would allow those companies or their associates to buy them back cheaply, said David Kaimowitz of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).