Indonesia's Moratorium on Deforestation

First published in The Forests for the Palms on 25 July 2013.

In May this year, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono released Presidential Instruction No. 6/2013, instructing for a two-year extension to a ban on clearing 158 hectares of primary rainforests and peatland. This extends the original two-year moratorium on deforestation that was declared in May 2011 (Presidential Instruction No. 10/2011) under a US$1 billion deal with Norway to incentivize forest protection in Indonesia as part of the UN-REDD Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. The ban preserves about fifty per cent of Indonesia's primary forests in an attempt to reduce the country's carbon emissions, up to eighty-five per cent of which have been traced to the clearing and draining of carbon-rich peatland, mostly related to plantation development. This agreement was to “pause” business-as-usual development to allow time for the government to establish a degraded-land database to provide the necessary information to identify areas of land acceptable for the establishment of economic activity, especially oil palm plantations.

The Indonesian palm oil industry has long opposed this moratorium. The Association of Indonesian Palm Oil Producers (GAPKI) lamented that producers stand to lose more than gain from the moratorium. Palm oil producers have pointed out contradictions between the moratorium and the governmental goals for continued expansion of the sector to reach a crude palm oil output of forty million tonnes per year by 2020. They have argued that for these goals to be achieved, companies “had no choice” but to continue establishing plantations on restricted areas. However, despite the stringent opposition from the palm oil lobby, the president went ahead with this second two-year moratorium.

While this can be taken as a positive sign of Indonesia's commitment to reducing deforestation and carbon emissions, environmentalists have identified several inherent weaknesses in the moratorium that remain unchanged in this second ban. First, this “Presidential Instruction” is a non-legislative document, meaning there are no legal consequences if the moratorium is not implemented. Hence, the instruction has not been able to stop permits from being issued at the local level.