If Indonesian forests were hospital patients, they would be late-stage cancer patients with their days numbered, the Minister of Forestry says.

Speaking at a PT Toyota factory in Karawang on Saturday, Malam Sambat Kaban said if the "virus" of illegal logging was not eradicated soon, the country's forests would only survive for another 15 years.
"The green belt stretching from Aceh to Papua, which balances the climates in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, would vanish," he said.
Kaban made the visit as part of his consultation with industry about environmental problems.
Kaban látogatása az ipar képviselőivel környezeti kérdésekről folytatott megbeszéléseinek egyik állomása volt.
Statistics showed that out of a total of 120 million hectares of forest area in the country, nearly 60 million ha had been degraded or destroyed in the past two decades mostly because of logging, with an average of 2.8 million ha ruined each year, Kaban said.
"(Forests are) like a human with stage IV cancer. I cannot imagine the impact on the global climate as its tropical forests, or the world's lungs, are damaged."
The financial losses suffered by this country from illegal logging were estimated from Rp 34 trillion (US$3.4 billion) to Rp 45 trillion annually, he said.
"That doesn't include the losses estimated from non-timber products, which contain medical elements."
Aside from working to rehabilitate the damaged forests, Kaban said his office had urged industry to green the environment by turning vacant land into forests.
About 17 million ha of unproductive, converted forest areas in the country were being claimed by many parties, he said, with forest areas often the first to fall victim to the establishment of a new administrative region. Local governments tended to turn forests into plantations by burning them, which caused forest fires and international pollution problems.
"There is no such a thing as (a spontaneous) forest fire (in Indonesia). Instead, people are opening land by burning it for the sake of efficiency," Kaban said, referring to the recent forest fires on Sumatra, which have created thick haze that reached Malaysia.
Kaban said his office had coordinated with Malaysia's Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Plantations to settle the haze problem.