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JAKARTA - Between 1986 and 1998, the period which culminated in the end of president Soeharto's 32-year rule, 17 million hectares of Indonesia's forests were cleared by timber, pulp and oil palm companies. Since then, If anything, the situation has only gotten worse.
According to the World Bank, Indonesia is now losing two million hectares of forest -- an area half the size of Taiwan -- each year. If present trends continue, the lowland forests of Sumatra will be gone by 2005. But are Indonesia's forests in as dire a state as statistics suggest?
"The loss and destruction of primary forest is extremely disturbing," says Wil de Jong, a social forester at the Bogor-based Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), "But it's not all doom and gloom," he added. "There is another story out there that needs to be told, too."
This is the story of the nation's secondary forests. These are regenerating forests, largely through natural processes in areas where the original primary forest has been either lost or disturbed. It is estimated that a third of Asia's tropical forest areas are now covered by secondary forests, yet policymakers in countries like Indonesia have largely neglected them.
"Secondary forests may be very useful to local communities -- and potentially for the corporate sector as well," suggests CIFOR forest ecologist Unna Chokkalingam, "But governments, foresters and conservationists often ignore them," she said. Indeed, secondary forests are all too often dismissed as wasteland.
CIFOR recently organized a week-long workshop on Asia's tropical secondary forests in Samarinda, East Kalimantan. Thirty-nine forest experts from 12 countries participated; they identified five main types of secondary forest in Asia, all of which are found in Indonesia. Among the most significant are the post-extraction secondary forests created by commercial logging.
In Indonesia, these probably account for at least one-third of the 41 million hectares identified as production forests. Forests which have regrown on land used for shifting cultivation, or swidden fallow secondary forests, also cover large areas of land, especially in Kalimantan and Irian Jaya. Shifting cultivators often create secondary forest gardens -- the third category of secondary forest -- by planting their swidden fallows with trees which provide fruits, nuts, resins and other products.
The final two categories of secondary forests include post-fire secondary forests, created by deliberate and accidental fires -- during the 1997/1998 El Ni¤o drought, for example, 10 million hectares of forest and land were burned -- and rehabilitated secondary forests, which are the product of regeneration efforts on degraded land.
Secondary forests are important for a variety of reasons. "They provide local people with many of the same goods and services as primary forests," says Chokkalingam, "and in addition they may contain large numbers of desirable species, many of them deliberately planted or encouraged."
Take the secondary forests of East Kalimantan. They provide food, fiber, medicinal herbs and building materials for the local Dayak communities, along with some secondary forests that also provide good hunting grounds. They are also particularly critical for the rural poor, and for those who live outside the cash economy.
Secondary forests often provide significant wildlife habitat, although they differ from primary forests in terms of vegetation, structure and species composition. "There are some species you seldom find in secondary forests," explains de Jong. He cites the example of ironwood, a tree used by the Dayaks to support their longhouse roofs.
However, many animals which prefer undisturbed forests -- the orangutan, for instance -- are regularly found in secondary forests, and certain browsing mammals and birds may actually prefer more open secondary forests. In the future, as primary forest resources decline, secondary forests could become a major source of timber and fiber. They could also deliver many of the same environmental services as primary forests. Secondary forests, for example, could be important in terms of watershed and soil protection.
In short, secondary forests matter. Yet, when their survival and well-being are threatened by development -- whether through road building, illegal logging, conversion to oil palm and timber plantations or other activities in the name of profit -- the authorities often turn a blind eye. Fortunately, more sensible attitudes towards secondary forests are gradually prevailing. Participants at the Samarinda workshop affirmed that countries like Nepal, India and China, where little forest remains, tend to recognize the significance of secondary forests for environmental, local livelihood and industrial purposes.
In these countries, most forest products are obtained from secondary forests, since governments realize that the welfare of rural people and the environment both often depend on the forests' regeneration and with the help of management. By contrast, countries which still possess significant areas of primary forest have tended to ignore their secondary forests.
"It is vital that forest agencies in countries like Indonesia start thinking about the management of these areas now," says de Jong, "rather than in 20 years time, when much of the forest will have gone." The consensus at the workshop was that governments need to establish where secondary forests are, what they are threatened by, and who is using them. Only then will they be able to work out how best they should be managed for future generations.
Jong also believes it is time for conservation groups such as World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Conservation International to recognize the important role which secondary forests can play in conserving biodiversity. Not that this should in any way diminish the need to preserve and protect primary rain forest. "That should be an absolute priority," he says, "but we must also recognize the increasing significance of secondary forests."
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