The dirty business of palm oil

Nils Klawitter in Spiegel Interntional: ...Bangku is located at the center of Indonesia's Sumatra island. It's a city full of people that have been pushed off their property and has been a flash point for years in one of the country's bloodiest land conflicts. Palm oil is at the center of the dispute. Almost every second product available in today's supermarkets contains the cheap natural resource, which is often labeled as "vegetable oil," masking its true identity. Palm oil can be found in shampoos, but also in margarine, frozen pizzas, ice cream and lipstick.

There are hundreds of conflicts over land with palm oil companies in Indonesia, but Bungku is considered to be one of the worst. The area's forest, which once provided nourishment to those who lived there, fell victim to the giant palm oil plantations of the firm Asiatic Persada in the mid-1980s. In the following years, the company's bulldozers illegally claimed a further 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of rain forest -- an area about half the size of Berlin. Included were areas for which indigenous people's held guaranteed land rights. But they were of little use against the palm oil industry.

On numerous occasions, mercenaries drove out village residents who attempted to return to the "land of our forefathers," as they say. The most recent incident happened only months ago. It's an unequal battle because it essentially pits tribal people against the henchmen of multinational behemoths like Wilmar.

Asia's leading agricultural concern supplies food companies like Anglo-Dutch consumer goods producer Unilever or Swiss multinational Nestlé. And for years Wilmar owned Asiatic Persada.

..."The World Bank also bears some responsibility for the death toll," says Feri Irawan, an environmental activist based in the nearby city of Jambi who has been observing the conflict for years. Irawan says the World Bank long showered Wilmar with loans, in complete disregard for the company's tangle of land conflicts...

A palm oil concession in Riau, Sumatra, shot by Hayden, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Indonesia's burning question

Amy Chew in Al-Jazeera.com:  Corruption and intimidation are being blamed by environmentalists for the choking smog that characterises the dry season on Indonesia's Sumatra island. Campaigners say that illegal slash-and-burn clearance by large corporations is causing rampant deforestation but persists because of widespread corruption among local officials.

The dry season inaugurates a period of intense activity for Indonesia's fire investigators, as large corporations and smallholders allegedly begin illegally burning their forests, a cheaper way to clear the land than chopping down trees. The burning leaves a choking haze over Riau province in Sumatra, a large island with nearly 50 million residents, and easterly winds take the stinging smog across the Strait of Malacca to Malaysia and Singapore.

But while open burning is illegal in Indonesia, authorities often turn a blind eye to fires started on land leased by big plantation companies, according to Bustar Maitar, the head of Greenpeace Indonesia's forest campaign. Foreign investors operating in Indonesia allegedly bribe local government officials to allow them to use slash-and-burn techniques on their land, Bustar says.

"A plantation will still make a profit if it spends money to chop down the trees rather than burning it. Large plantations just want to get bigger profits," he said. The environmental organisation is warning of more forest fires to come as the country approaches the 2014 legislative and presidential elections, pointing out that local authorities are reported to give land concessions to individuals and corporations in exchange for campaign funds...

A NASA view of fires in Sumatra in October 2006

'The Sumatran rainforest will mostly disappear within 20 years'

John Vidal in the globaldevelopment blog in the Guardian (UK): The end is in sight for the great forests of Sumatra and Borneo and the animals and people who depend on them. Thirty years ago the world's third- and sixth-largest islands were full of tigers, elephants, rhinos, orangutan and exotic birds and plants but in a frenzy of development they have been trashed in a single generation by global agribusiness and pulp and paper industries.

Their plantations supply Britain and the world with toilet paper, biofuels and vegetable oil to make everyday foods such as margarine, cream cheese and chocolate, but distraught scientists and environmental groups this week warn that one of the 21st century's greatest ecological disasters is rapidly unfolding.

Official figures show more than half of Indonesia's rainforest, the third-largest swath in the world, has been felled in a few years and permission has been granted to convert up to 70% of what remains into palm or acacia plantations. The government last week renewed a moratorium on the felling of rainforest, but nearly a million hectares are still being cut each year and the last pristine areas, in provinces such as Ache and Papua, are now prime targets for giant logging, palm and mining companies.

The toll on wildlife across an area nearly the size of Europe is vast, say scientists who warn that many of Indonesia's species could be extinct in the wild within 20-30 years. Orangutan numbers are in precipitous decline, only 250-400 tigers remain and fewer than 100 rhino are left in the forests, said the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Millions of hectares are nominally protected, but the forest is fragmented, national parks are surrounded by plantations, illegal loggers work with impunity and corruption is rife in government....

A 1915 shot of a bridge in the Sumatran forest, from the Tropenmuseum Collection, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Indonesia moves towards approving deforestation plan

Terra Daily via AFP: The Indonesian government has said it aims to approve within a month a plan that would free up vast swathes of protected virgin rainforest on Sumatra island for commercial exploitation. Rights groups reacted with outrage at the news that the plan, which also needs to be passed by the Aceh provincial parliament, was making progress, saying it would only benefit huge foreign companies and not the area's people.

But Canadian mining company East Asia Minerals, which conducts gold exploration in Aceh, hailed the progress as "positive news for mineral extraction in the area". The government aimed to approve the plan "in up to a month", senior forestry ministry official Hadi Daryanto said late Thursday. Rights groups say it will free up around 1.2 million hectares (three million acres) to be cleared.

The head of the Aceh parliamentary committee overseeing the project, Tengku Anwar, said it had a lot of support in the legislature. "We hope it will go through as soon as possible," he said. Approval of the plan would open up the forest, on the northern tip of Sumatra province and home to critically endangered orangutans, rhinos, and elephants, for mining, paper and palm oil plantations...

From Hermann von Rosenberg: „Der Malayische Archipel. Land und Leute in Schilderungen, gesammelt während eines dreissigjährigen Aufenthaltes in den Kolonien.“ Leipzig, Verlag von Gustav Weigel, 1878.