You Don't Say!! Indonesia's "Certified" Timber Program A Rat's Nest Of Corruption, Forgery & Theft

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In 2020 and 2021, the Indonesian Independent Forest Monitoring Network (JPIK) working with PPLH Mangkubumi, a nonprofit grassroots group, organized Indigenous peoples and local communities to monitor 32 timber companies in five provinces: Central Kalimantan, North Maluku, West Papua, East Java and Central Java. The companies in question all possess timber legality certificates and represent the entire supply chain, from logging to exports. The monitoring discovered numerous violations of the SVLK system throughout the supply chain. For starters, the observers found logging companies were cutting down trees outside their legally permitted concessions and tagging the logs with legality certificates that effectively declared the wood came from inside the concessions.

In North Maluku’s Central Halmahera district, for instance, they found logging companies were slapping legal documents from local landowners on illegally logged timber — as if the companies had bought the timber from these locals, when in fact they hadn’t, said PPLH Mangkubumi spokesman Agus Budi Purwanto. In other cases, companies were paying off locals to do the illegal logging for them.

There were similar violations found further down the production chain, when the timber was shipped off to woodworking shops in the East Java cities of Surabaya and Gresik to be made into furniture and handicrafts. Here, the observers found the shops manipulating records of the wood they had purchased from illegal loggers, making it appear as if it came from certified companies.

In other cases, timber records were manipulated to look like shipments were coming from multiple companies, in an apparent effort to obscure the origin of the wood. Even when these woodworking shops were busted for the violations and had their legality certificates revoked, they could continue operating simply by applying for a new certificate from a different government-appointed assessment agency. From these shops, much of the wood products is exported to countries like China. Yet even at this stage, where official scrutiny is more intense, violations abounded, the observers found.

They recorded 14 exporting companies based in Semarang, Central Java, selling forged legal documents, known as v-legal certificates, to furniture companies that didn’t possess such certificates, so that their products would be eligible for export. The forged v-legal documents typically sold for 2 million to 8 million rupiah ($140 to $560) per container of wood products destined for export.

EDIT

https://news.mongabay.com/2021/09/monitoring-reveals-indonesias-legal-timber-scheme-riddled-with-violations/