As soon as President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, along with more than 100 other leaders attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), signed the landmark deal on “no deforestation” by 2030 on Nov. 2, his Forestry and Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar put out a qualifier: For Indonesia, it does not mean a complete stop to deforestation.

Which part of “no” did we not understand?

Siti made the explanation of Indonesia’s position within 24 hours of the agreement, during a meeting with Indonesian overseas students in the Scottish city of Glasgow, the United Kingdom, where COP26 is taking place. She posted the statement to the same effect on her social media accounts, in Bahasa Indonesia, to make sure folks back home know where Indonesia stands.

Should she not have explained this to the global audience at the conference? Having signed the agreement, Indonesia owes an explanation to the world. Sure enough, within days, news reached Glasgow of Indonesia’s about-face, but not from official sources.

Is Indonesia trying to pull a fast one at COP26? On the one hand, Indonesia joins the world in the call to stop deforestation, but on the other, it is telling the nation, in Siti’s words, that there was no way that the government would sacrifice Jokowi’s “massive development programs” in the name of “zero deforestation” and “zero carbon emissions”.

That the government should take this position is not surprising, though still disappointing. For years, the government’s promise to slow deforestation has come unstuck in the name of economic development, although the real beneficiaries of these programs are not so much the people living in the forest areas as the government would claim, but the big corporations who are turning large tracts of forests primarily into oil palm plantations.

Why did Indonesia sign the deal, when it was obvious to all that the agreement means zero deforestation by 2030. No means no. No other countries with large forests to protect like Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo have opted out of the agreement.

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