JAKARTA - 8.39 million hectares of forests owned by West Papua turned out to be only guarded by 98 forest police officers. This number is really not ideal because at least every district and city should be able to have 20 forest police officers.
Head of West Papua Forestry, Hendrik Runaweri, said the existing 98 forest police officers were not ideally used to protect forests in West Papua.
"Our forestry police are only 98 people. However, many will retire, ideally there will be 240 to 300 forestry police in West Papua," said Hendrik, Tuesday, December 13, as reported by Antara.
Runaweri explained, in theory, one forestry police officer has a guarding area of approximately 10,000 hectares. So that with the current number of people, one person must guard about 85.6 thousand hectares, if using health, it requires as many as 800 forest police officers to be guarded optimally and ideally.
"At that time we submitted a proposal to the BKD (Regional Civil Service Agency) but there has been no response. We hope it can be added immediately so that it can be maximized in the supervision of forest functions," continued Runaweri.
He also said that serious attention to the forestry area must be carried out considering that West Papua is a conservation area, and forest voters are quite large, namely 6.73 hectares of all forest areas owned.
"As a conservation area, if this condition continues, it is feared that our forest area will decrease due to unregistered activities," he said.
Even so, Runaweri is optimistic that the Forestry Service with offices in the Regency and City will always work optimally to keep forest areas in West Papua safe and sustainable.
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