Amidst surging waves of complaints lodged by oil palm growers against the uncertainty of cultivation rights (HGU) in their plantation areas, Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar admitted the complexity of land and forest problems in Indonesia. The forest complexity has created many problems, economically, ecologically, and socially, including the overlapping legal status of oil palm plantations.
Addressing the 60th anniversary of the forestry faculty of Yogyakarta-based University of Gajah Mada (YGM) in Yogyakarta on Friday, 20 October 2023, Minister Siti Nurbaya revealed a number of main forestry problems, which include licensing and forest use rights, land and forest fires (Karhutla), transboundary haze, deforestation, tenure conflicts, illegal logging, and forest encroachment.
“Other problems are related to peatland, social forestry, and customary forests,” she said in a speech titled “Turbulence and Paradigm of Indonesian Forestry Development”.
Actually, Indonesian forestry analysts have long identified the forest complexity, which has also contributed to the obscurity of legal status attached to land and forest utilization for economic purposes. One of the analysts is Petrus Gunarso, who focused on the complexity related to the HGU received by oil palm growers for development of their oil palm plantations.
“The complexity of forest spatial planning in Indonesia was started from the government’s issuances of ambiguous laws, weak system of coordination and decision making process that was strongly influenced by political interests, sectoral interests, business interests and individual interests of leaders of ministries and government institutions. Prominent among the laws (UU) are the agrarian law no.5/1960 (UUPA) on non-forest areas that was issued during the old order under the administration of President Soekarno and the law no.5/1967 on forestry utilization (UUPK) issued during the new order under the administration of President Soeharto,” he said.
He said that the UUPA is still effective until now. But the UUPK has been revised with the law No. 41/1999 on forestry sector. Previously, the UUPK and all of its implementing regulations were focused on exploitation of forestry, especially logging. Then the UU No.41/1999 is balanced with ecological improvement as damages already done to the forests, especially those subjected to forest utilization rights (HPH).
The damaged forest condition was worsened by the government’s issuance of regional autonomy Law No.22/1999, although it was later revised with the Law No.32/2004. It has allowed the establishment of hundreds of new regencies/mayoralties and gives authorities to all regional governments to change their land and forest spatial planning and give certain land and forest use rights for companies. By the year 2000, there were around 580 HPH rights given to private companies with forest concessions amounted to more than 64 million hectares. There have been also HGU rights given for development of industrial forest and various plantations, including oil palm plantations, which have actually helped regreening the degraded forests caused by HPH.
There have been rampant cases of overlapping legal status on land and forest areas due to unclear maps of forest areas, especially those categorized as productive forests, and non-forest areas categorized as areas for other purposes (APL). The non-forest areas are the authority of the ministry of agrarian and spatial planning (ATR), the forest areas are the authority of the environment and forestry ministry, while the regional governments can obscurely take authorities over the forest areas and non-forest areas through their own policies of land and forest spatial planning.
Under such circumstance, it is no wonder that the environment and forestry ministry and the palm oil task force (Satgas Sawit) found that a total of 3.3 million hectares of oil palm plantations are located at forest areas despite the fact that the owners had received their HGU before embarking on the plantation development.
Apparently, such uncertainties and irregularities have played into many hands, not only unscrupulous leaders in central government and the regional governments, but even to the hands of green NGOs inimical to certain forestry and agricultural products as the irregularities can help them in their negative campaigns against the products, including the palm oil.
Filep Wamafma, Deputy Chairman of the regional representative council’s (DPD) Committee-I, said recently that despite dragging cases of HGU problems, the government has been slow in resolving the issues. So far, there have been more than 1,700 HGU found legally problematic. Recently, the KPK (corruption eradication commission) has found that 8.3 million hectares of land areas already given HGU rights are not yet legally clear and clean. “I ask the government to quickly solve the problems of HGU and derelict lands to avoid conflicts between the government and the public,” said Filep.
Minister Siti Nurbaya said that the government has taken a number of approaches to tackle the forestry problems. The approaches include interventions through regulations, controlling and supervising, legal enforcement, capacity building, development of inventory and monitoring system.
According to her, the solution approaches are designed and implemented by the ministry of environment and forestry (KLHK) by considering various instruments of policies at home and at global scale, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), UN-CBD, Convention on Biodiversity, Nagoya Protocol, Paris Agreement, etc.
“Such approaches have resulted in better indicators of forest development, such as target to reduce greenhouse gas emission in forestry sector. It has been realized through its achievement of realizing the all time low rate of deforestation in Indonesia,” she said.
“In the context of forest use, there has been a transformation from single-licensed scheme that is only focused on woods to multi-forestry business scheme,” she said, adding that such forest use rights are not only given to companies but also to the general public under the scheme of social forestry.
She said that other indicators are the increase of technology applications and optimization of system of planning and monitoring the forest resource management. “So, we’re moving towards a new paradigm and new balance in managing our Indonesian forests,” she said.
But despite the achievement, she said the turbulence will persist and become more complex and more challenging. “Instead of just paying attention to the market, we should also heed the ecological principles. As the forest turbulence is getting more complex and more challenging, we need to jointly take actions to create a balance and fairness in the forestry utilization for the improvement of public welfare,” she said. (By Benget Besalicto ST)
