Today, on the way to a meeting with the local NGO Elang, I passed villagers from the Kampar Peninsula, a carbon-rich and biodiverse ecoystem that is under attack by Sinar Mas’ oil palm operations and their timber division Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), on a hunger strike.

In front of the provincial parliament building, a group of men and women from the village of Kijang Kejo have set up a plastic tarp and banner, announcing to Riau’s elected officials that they will not eat until the oil palm plantation PT Arindo Tri Sejahtera, who stole their land and then paid thugs to kill three of their family members, is brought to justice.

10 days into their hunger strike, the villagers are pale and weak, sleeping while motor bikes and buses fly by them on the road. They told me they have not been able to meet with any members of the provincial government, and were not sure how much longer they could last without food.

The group that owns this particular plantation, Surya Dumai, might be on the nastier end of the scale of dirty, dangerous, and destructive oil palm and timber companies, but this is how the resource extraction game is played here in Riau, Sumatra; buy the military, government, and media and trample any local people that dare to stand up for their rights.

APP and Sinar Mas have been shown to violate Indonesian law and human rights, but with the authorities in their pocket, it is us, the consumers of timber and palm oil, that must demand  producers respect forests and the people who inhabit them.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

Exhausted from the canoe rides, bad roads, the concrete maze of Jakarta, and the foreign environment of a Kuala Lumpor convention hall, I found Pak Jamaluddin on the second day of the RSPO outside, sitting cross legged on the sidewalk. He waved me over, and I sat with him. He leaned over to me as he whispered: “It is over. Our forest is gone. Duta Palma has flattened the last of it. We are finished.”

A few months before, I visited with Pak Jamaluddin in his village of Semunying Jaya. Deep in the interior of Borneo, his village had become a hotspot of rainforest destruction and human rights abuse at the hands of the palm oil producer Duta Palma.

A Dayak community, Semunying Jaya’s residents had survived for centuries hunting forest pigs and gathering valuable honey, resins, and rattan, which they sold to Malaysian traders that would visit their village.

When I arrived in July, Pak Jamalludin was outspoken, angry, and in the midst of a brutal struggle to hold on to the last of his community’s traditional forest. Almost all of the rainforest surrounding Semunying Jaya had been flattened and burned by Duta Palma. Targeted by the company, Pak Jamalludin was jailed for his efforts to present his community’s case to the company and government. But the remaining rainforest gave Pak Jamaluddin hope, and he tirelessly tried to save it. Motivated by his struggle, I wrote a case study about his community’s case and shot a short film.

Pak Jamaluddin had traveled to the annual meeting of the RSPO in Kuala Lumpor to meet with Duta Palma, and ask for them to respect his community’s right to Free, Informed, and Prior consent, and compensate Semunying Jaya for the destruction of their culture, livelihood, and future. But, reflective of their complete disrespect of RSPO member responsibilities,  Duta Palma did not send a representative to the meeting.

Sitting on the cement, with no Duta Palma representatives at the RSPO and the last of his community’s forest destroyed for oil palm, Pak Jamaluddin did not have any struggle left in him.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

Early on, the RSPO identified accountability and transparency as key criteria to reduce the palm oil industry’s corrupt, dirty, and dangerous practices. Reflecting such, the first criteria for joining the RSPO are commitments to transparency.

But even a basic level of transparency is too much to ask from the USA’s largest producer and trader of palm oil, Cargill. Cargill was quick to sign up for the RSPO and to claim their support for the RSPO’s criteria. But when it comes to actually following the RSPO’s criteria for sustainable palm oil, Cargill is a non-starter. Hiring a questionable audit firm, Cargill has managed to pay its way into RSPO certification without living up to RSPO criteria.

This week, I attended the RSPO’s annual conference with two victims of Cargill’s oil palm operations in Indonesia. These community members, one of them the head of his small Indonesian village, traveled thousands of miles to meet Cargill face to face, to fight for the land Cargill has taken away from them.

Interested in their plight, one of the top-ranking members of the RSPO’s Executive Board agreed to help set up a meeting with Cargill. But William Griffiths, one of Cargill’s key managers based in Singapore, refused to meet with these effected community members. Cargill’s reply: “It is better we do not meet.”

William Griffiths had the time to travel from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, to spend multiple days at the RSPO, meeting with buyers and other palm oil producers, but he did not find 30 minutes to listen to representatives from his own plantations express their concerns about Cargill’s dirty, dangerous, and neo-colonial practices in Indonesia.

Palm oil production in Indonesia, where Cargill is a major player, is killing the last of the world’s wild orangutans, bringing poverty to forest peoples,  and causing global warming. The first step in addressing these issues is to bring access and accountability to these companies. As William Griffiths made painfully clear at the RSPO, Cargill has no interest in improving their negative practices, no interest in the welfare of local communities at their plantations, and has repeatedly failed to live up to their own commitments to the RSPO.

MORE on Cargill’s legacy of destruction and neo-colonial practices in Indonesia.

Just minutes ago, the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) passed a resolution, introduced by the Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS), to expel any member who clears portions of the Bukit Tigapuluh ecosystem, which has been found to contain large numbers of High Conservation Value Forests (HCVFs).

This is the sole bright spot of what has been a depressing RSPO, where oil palm producers have failed to address previous complaints against the worst of the worst oil palm producers like Duta Palma, and blocked any criteria limiting Green House Gas Emissions.

Pak Daud, one of Sinar Mas’ top managers, stood up to try and block the resolution: “There is no clarity on this, we need better data, this is a grey area.” He then tried to avoid responsibility by claiming that because a subsidiary of Sinar Mas is doing the clearing, the RSPO has no power to limit Sinar Mas’ actions. His plea met with boos from the crowd.

This surprising development at the RSPO puts some serious pressure on Sinar Mas to immediately stop all destruction of the only reintroduction site in Sumatra for orangutans, one of the largest habitats for the Sumatran tiger, and the territory of some of the most traditional hunter gathers in the world.

It is also a call for the RSPO to live up to their own criteria and take action against Sinar Mas if they continue their dirty and dangerous operations at Bukit Tigapuluh. This will be a new test for the RSPO.  For the sake of the world’s forests, forest peoples, and climate, I hope this deeply trouble palm oil group is up to the task.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights.

He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

At the core of the controversy has been the effort to include a commitment by all members of the RSPO to reduce their Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. After two years of meetings, the Malaysian and Indonesian producers managed to block any such commitment. It was a disappointing moment for the RSPO, and a lost opportunity to address one of the most serious issues of oil palm production.

Supporters of the new criteria made lots of concessions, Tim Killeen of Conservation International and a member of the GHG working group told me. His main focus was to include a criteria that would effectively protect peat lands, the most carbon rich habitat in the world, from oil palm expansion. But even this was too much for the producers to stomach. It is clear that anything that would change ‘business as usual’ – which is the massive destruction of peat lands, burning forests, and significant contributions to climate chaos -  is unacceptable for producers.

Had GHG emissions standards been included, there might have been a chance that some of the dirtiest producers of oil palm would have pulled out, but the core of the RSPO was never in jeopardy. It is clear, the RSPO would rather be a diluted certification standard that includes everyone that wants to join rather than a true step towards palm oil that does not harm people, forests, and the climate.

So then, what relevance does the term “sustainable” have for the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil? In my opinion, which is shared by many of the social and environmental groups here, the short answer is none.

There is nothing sustainable about the social conflict, forest destruction, and climate change caused by RSPO members. In a visit to one of the worst of the worst palm oil producers, Duta Palma, this past summer, I witnessed the massive burning of primary forests and the use of force to evict a traditional community from their ancestral lands, all to produce a tasteless vegetable oil.  The actions of Duta Palma, which violates just about every criteria of the RSPO but who is still a RSPO member, have been subject to a complaint filed to the RSPO by a broad range of Indonesian NGOs. After four months,  the RSPO has still not responded to this complaint.

This is a critical moment for the RSPO. With no action on GHG emissions and multiple complaints filed to the RSPO regarding criteria violations, it is time for the RSPO to live up to their use of the word sustainable or risk becoming an irrelevant group of stakeholders that can not seem to agree on anything.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights.

He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

“They say oil palm is development. They say Malaysia has cars and big cities because of oil palm. But it is not oil palm, it is from other things, like our oil and our logging. Giant companies, most of them Malaysian, ignore customary land rights and take our land out from under us. They develop it into oil palm. They use only foreign workers, or people from Kuala Lumpur to drive the trucks and run the offices. For the day laborers, they will not even hire us local people, because we are Malaysians and have some basic rights. So they hire Indonesians who have come here illegally and have no rights, no one to protect them from the bad working conditions and horrible pay. The Malay people, who live near us, they all get a few hectares of land from the Company to have their own oil palm, but rather than work that land they too hire Indonesians. The government, using their oil and gas and timber money gives these Malay government jobs too, so even though they live in the countryside they can buy cars. The owners of the Company get rich, so rich. Then they take that money and invest it in oil palm in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where they can do whatever they want, there are no laws there. And they get even richer.

But us, us people from the forest, who live in the longhouses, what are we left with? Nothing. And the Malay people, who have cars, is this a sustainable economy, that depends on illegal labor and government jobs to support the common man? I think not.

Oil palm does not lead to the development of a country. Wealth, contained in the natural resources of the our forests and controlled by us,  is flattened and burned, and then collected by the world’s rich, from Companies like Sinar Mas, Cargill, IOI, and Duta Palma. Oil palm does not bring wealth to the poor, it takes it away. Oil palm development, like so many neo-colonial trading systems, makes the poor poorer and the rich richer.

Supporting this argument, so powerfully and simply laid out by a man from the last of Borneo’s almost extinct forests with no formal education but a lifetime of wisdom,  is a year long research project. One I hope to complete some day. But for now, lets just take his word for it, as a man who has lost his livelihood, way of life, and future so one of the world’s largest companies, Wilmar, can become a little bit richer.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

We’re working with the local Twin Cities RAN Chapter crafting ideas, strategies and tactics to get the largest privately held company in the US, Cargill, to adopt a global forest policy to stop destroying rainforests, family farmers and the climate for palm oil expansion!

I met much of the local Minnesota community envisioning such an environmental shift this past weekend at the Northland Bioneers Conference, which exists to help us “connect, learn, focus, and shift.”  We talked about our visions and hopes for the future of a more sustainable and just world, including practical ways to achieve them.  This type of big picture thinking coupled with local level action is exactly how I engaged hundreds of people at my RAN Exhibitor table talking about Cargill, forests, climate change and loss of biodiversity.

The communities surrounding Cargill, from St. Cloud, MN to Woodvill, WI, are fired up about Cargill’s lack of accountability for their practices here as well as abroad.  So many wanted to take action, in fact, that almost every other exhibitor signed onto our newly forming coalition! We now have eight local business and organizations supporting our campaign and helping to raise awareness in the community, such as Friends of Coldwater; several more such as IATP (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy) and Network for Spiritual Progressives are in the works.

Over 200 people signed our petition, I signed up new RAN members, and I distributed about a thousand newly printed campaign materials to spread awareness about Cargill’s egregious behavior in the US and abroad.

It was incredibly inspiring to meet many of the big movers and shakers in the Minnesota environmental and social change community. We are laying a great foundation to win this campaign in the next year by building a solid network in this community, one that is not afraid to hold Cargill accountable! Cargill can’t continue fooling us to think they are actually “making a substantial contribution to local community development,” as they purport on their website.

Close to 11pm last night after the last Bioneers volunteer crew loaded up the final tables and chairs to head home, we made the final touches on our banner for today’s action at Cargill’s downtown office in the Grain Exchange.

Check out Hillary’s blog post about today’s Cargill protest with over a dozen activists, three orangutans, and our delivery of demands to Cargill staff!

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a nation that does not easily fit with our society’s dominant ideas of development, property, and conservation. Many Papuans have little interaction with the cash economy; although categorized by development indexes as poor, these Papuans have never known food scarcity or landless poverty.  Individual land holdings are rare – most land is held in communal agreements based on complex family, tribal, and political ties – but the nation has seemed to avoid the everyman for themselves, tragedy-of-the-commons dynamic Western thinkers have predicted for such communal agreements. For generations, PNG did not have a single national park or government protected conservation area, but the country has resisted the devastating rates of forest destruction that has plagued other tropical nations.

PNG’s unique geography, people, and ecosystems just do not fit very well into Western models of just about anything. But, in a trend seen all over the world, that is not stopping the World Bank and multinational agribusiness giant Cargill from forcing PNG to accept their investment-extraction-profit model.

After multiple rounds of multi-million dollar investment, and the creation of three massive oil palm estates, observers in Papua are beginning to see the effects of imposing a foreign model of development on PNG: increases in deforestation, heightened land conflicts, alcohol abuse, AIDS, and the emergence of landless poverty, a once unknown phenomenon.

After a month of detailed research, drawing from anthropological studies, societal and environmental impact assessments by the World Bank, and courageous field work carried out by the International Accountability Project, RAN has  just released a case study on Cargill’s oil palm operations in PNG: Commodity Colonialism: A case study on Cargill’s oil palm operations in Papua New Guinea, laying out the truly dangerous effects of oil palm on this unique nation.

RAN is committed to providing impacted communities a voice at the table. A few weeks ago we sponsored a trip for Matilda Pilacapio, a PNG environmental activist and landowner from Cargill’s Milne Bay plantation, to come and dialogue with Cargill management in Minnesota.

An article on Matilda was featured over on Mongabay, a number of speaking events, and in a video interview right here on the Understory.

Cargill is the biggest importer of palm oil into the United States yet, despite our tireless work, it continues refusing to implement a global forest policy to protect rainforests, communities and the climate.  Sourcing palm oil from suppliers who are clearing and burning rainforests in South East Asia to make way for palm oil plantations with no regard for human rights or environmental standards, Cargill is exacerbating climate change.  Deforestation is responsible for 20 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world – more than all the world’s cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships and factories combined!

Meanwhile, a United Nations study warns that 98 percent of Indonesia’s forests will be destroyed by 2022 and more than five million Indigenous people will be forced off their land by 2010 to create room for palm plantations.

So as the largest privately owned company in the United States and the second largest in the world, with their 2008 revenues totaling $120.4 billion, something in this picture just doesn’t seem right.  Wouldn’t it seem “ethical” or “right,” dare I suggest, that they make an investment in their huge portion of the palm industry and work to become a leader in socially and environmentally responsible palm oil production? It’s not like they couldn’t afford it. This would be the first step towards meeting our demands of an over-arching forest policy that would reach beyond palm oil and govern over Cargill’s entire commodity selling and trading, not just limited to oil palm.

If we can get Cargill to establish a policy, we’ll get their competitors to follow suit. Last night we made some progress.

In our meeting with Cargill last night, we made it clear that we’re elevating our pressure locally in the Minneapolis/St. Paul and nationally until we see a drafted forest policy on the table.  This means we’re building a massive grassroots network of support locally by reaching out to food co-ops, students, businesses, and community organizations.  We’re also going to be contacting and engaging with some of Cargill’s largest customers (which include but are not limited to Kraft, Colgate, Proctor and Gamble, General Mills, and Dean Foods) to pressure them to cancel contracts with Cargill.

Last night the Cargill rep we met with was not happy about the thousands of calls generated or the upcoming actions we’re coordinating in Minnesota.  It’s upsetting to them. But it makes me even angrier that we have to convince Cargill that destroying rainforests is bad.

My full-time job is to create as much noise and pressure on Cargill that they will do anything to make it go away. We’d like to think that a forest policy is possible from good intention and responsible business practice, but we know it’s not that easy.

Burning the early morning oils, I’m preparing for a trip out to Cargill’s neighborhood later today – the Twin Cities as my colleagues prepare for the upcoming Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Malaysia next week where along with our allies and partners on the ground we’ll be hi-lighting RSPO violations by the worst of the worst companies.

Cargill has a 150 year history in agriculture and food. They wonder how they can feed the world with growing demands AND save the planet.  It is possible but it’s going to take some strong, unified, strategic pressure.  So please join us and take action!

We’re screening “Green” at the University of Minnesota tonight to get people fired up, taking part in 350.org’s national day of climate action Saturday, working Bioneers all weekend and culminating our week of action at Cargill’s downtown grain exchange Monday during their lunch hour! There will be several orangutans holding banners and spreading the word – if you’re in Minneapolis, come join us!

Meanwhile, more and more companies and business groups (Apple, Exelon, PG&E) are dropping their membership in the Chamber and public opposition to the Chambers’ climate change denial is growing. The latest opposition is coming from the high tech sector, where the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Silicon Valley Joint Venture are running an ad campaign against the Chamber for its opposition. And the Chamber is on the run, having been forced to backpedal on its claims to be the voice of the business community; last week the Chamber claimed to ‘represent’ 3 million businesses, but this week it quietly reduced that number to ‘300,000’ members. Investors are calling for companies that they own shares in to drop their membership in the Chamber, and local Chambers are formally distancing themselves from the US Chamber’s opposition to action on climate change.

As well they should. The Chamber of Commerce is behind the times: most companies have caught up with modern public values on climate change. For nearly ten years, the Carbon Disclosure Project has been surveying the leading global companies for their responses on climate change. In the most recent report issued earlier this year, 82% of the world’s largest 500 companies responded to the questionaire on their carbon emissions, 68% are reporting and tracking their emissions, and 51% have disclosed emissions reduction targets, all to report to investors representing over $55 trillion in capital investments. These companies are implementing global action plans for a carbon-constrained world, but the US Chamber of Commerce representing many if not most of these companies is heading in the opposite direction.

Here’s a note to Corporate America: every single company that claims to be taking climate change seriously yet continues to support the climate-change denying Chamber of Commerce, companies like Cargill, Microsoft (MSFT), Toyota (TM), FedEx (FDX) and Ford (F) – it’s time to come clean.

The US Chamber of Commerce is a national embarrassment, and corporations that continue to support this institution are standing in the way of progress in stopping climate change. It’s time for Chamber members to change or leave.