Indonesia has announced plans to have around 200,000ha of oil palm plantations found in areas designated as forests returned to the state to be converted back to forests, Reuters reported a government official as saying.
The world’s biggest palm oil producer and exporter had published rules in 2020 to determine the legality of plantations operating in areas designated as forests, the 1 November report said.
Officials said the measures were necessary as some companies had already been farming the land for years, although green groups had attacked the government for forgiving past forest encroachment.
According to the rules, companies had to submit paperwork and pay fines to obtain cultivating rights on their plantation by 2 November.
While 3.3M ha of the country’s almost 17M ha of palm plantation had been found in forests, only owners of plantations with a combined size of 1.67M ha had been identified, forestry ministry secretary general Bambang Hendroyono told reporters.
The government was still cataloguing which of those were found in designated production forests (meaning owners would have to pay fines but they could continue to grow oil palm trees), and which were in protected areas and must be returned to the state, Hendroyono said.
Hendroyono estimated that around 200,000ha would be returned although he said this figure could increase.
“The government wants to restore the [plantations] in protected forests and conservation forests, after [the owners] pay the fine,” Hendroyono was quoted as saying, adding this would be part of the government’s efforts to mitigate climate change.
Indonesia’s chief security minister Mohammad Mahfud MD had said he would take legal action against palm oil companies that used land illegally after the deadline passed, the report said.
Against a backdrop of criticism from environmentalists of palm oil’s impact on deforestation, Indonesia had launched several programmes to improve governance in its palm oil industry, Reuters wrote.
This year’s launch of a task force aimed at ensuring companies paid the right taxes followed an industry-wide audit last year.
