Although there is no reliable statistical data on illegal mining in Indonesia, it is believed that these activities have significant impact on the country’s mining industry. Not only breed problems of social, economic, and environmental; they also absorb more employment than any formal mining sector and reach those who live at the lower end. Until recently, there are still ambiguities from the government, as well as from the NGOs, politicians, and local societies in defining and taking position toward these activities.
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Yesterday the PNG Post-Courier told us that a report written for the Australian Institute of Criminology had found that ‘as much as 70 to 90 per cent of logging in PNG … is illegal’, and that the scale of such illegal logging meant that PNG’s timber resources would be ‘depleted in 10 years if logging continues at the present rate’. I duly reported to the AIC website and found the report, thinking to make a post to this blog about the history of recent claims about the extent of illegal logging in PNG. But blow me if I wasn’t beaten to it by Brian Gomez, editor of The National newspaper in PNG, whose eagerness to beat about this particular bush might not be entirely unconnected to the fact that his newspaper is owned by PNG’s biggest logging company, Rimbunan Hijau. Brian repeats a story about the ‘70-90%’ claim which seems to be derived from an article published by Tim Curtin in Pacific Economic Bulletin last year. Indeed, this is just the latest episode or wave in a wider debate about the ‘facts’ of logging in PNG which has been going on for many a long year. In this particular instance, I think we can now safely assert that the proportion of logs illegally harvested in PNG is somewhere in the range of 0-100%, and what needs to be done now is to find a round percentage within this range for which no claim has yet been published.
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