The minister of Forestry of Indonesia MS Kaban put the first stone in the establishment of postgraduate building of Forestry Faculty of UGM on Saturday (8/11). The official establishment is held in the same time with Lustrum IX and 45th Anniversary of Forestry Faculty of UGM. MS Kaban also symbolically gave one million seeds of Jati Unggul Nusantara tree for the Pager Gunung farming group, Piyungan, Bantul.
The dean of forestry faculty Prof Mochammad Na'im said that this building will have three floors and built on 1800 meter square land, with a cost of IDR 6.25 billion.
The fund needed to build the building was taken from UGM’s RKAT and DIPA funds and contribution from alumni. The building will be used as the Forestry Faculty’s management center of master and doctoral program, consisted of financial and academic administration, cafeteria, IT room and forestry short course room. 1
MS Kaban welcomed the establishment and said that the postgraduate program in Forestry Faculty of UGM can support the forestry education in Indonesia. He added that forestry education in several countries such as U.S.A, Russia and Brazil is having a bad time, with the decreasing quality and quantity.
He also pointed out to illegal logging and the tree-planting in his speech. He said that the government has caught many illegal loggers and the amount of the illegal loggers is decreasing, even though some of them are ‘slimy’. He also added that the decreasing frequency and volume of illegal logging cases is also possible because the support of many countries in the world
In terms of tree planting program, he said that in 2007 there were 80 million trees planted by the society recorded. In 2008 he targeted that there will be 100 million trees planted. He also added that the government has allocated IDR 9 trillion to support the program.
(Public Relations of UGM/Gusti Grehenson)