Here in Riau, Indonesia, signs of the struggle to save the last of Sumatra’s forest is everywhere. Daily, the papers cover stories of timber and oil palm companies destroying forests, engaging in corruption, driving land conflicts, sponsoring violence, and marginalizing indigenous peoples.

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.

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On the first day of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) Pak Jamaluddin was quiet. He said the air conditioning of Kuala Lumpor gave him the flu. He seemed lost among the groups of palm producers, with their Blackberries and dark suits.

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.

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The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was founded to create a path towards sustainability in the palm oil industry. A voluntary process, oil palm producers, traders, buyers, and NGO’s have joined up to find an alternative to the massive forest destruction, social conflict, and climate chaos the booming palm oil industry is bringing to the world’s rainforests. But eight years into the process, there is still nothing sustainable about the palm oil the RSPO endorses.

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. More »

Contrary to a number of sensationalist media reports leading up to this year’s Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil, the RSPO is not breaking up.

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.

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The RSPO is the world’s largest annual meeting of oil palm industry, environmentalists, human rights advocates, and, most importantly, community members. Today, I watched as a community member from Borneo stood up in front of oil palm producers, NGOs, and technocrats, identified himself as a victim of oil palm expansion, and tore apart the falsity that some of the world’s richest businessmen desperately want us to believe; the falsity that oil palm helps the world’s poor:

“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. More »

A new, hard hitting, RAN case study on Cargill’s oil palm operations in PNG, ‘Commodity Colonialism’, is now available for download HERE.

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.

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Here at RAN the agribusiness campaign is hard at work pressuring US agribusiness companies, with a  focus on the massive privately held company Cargill, to stop their dirty and dangerous practices of developing oil palm plantations in the rich tropical rainforests of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea.

Cargill has a total of five oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia, divided into more than twenty estates that have been carved out of the world’s most diverse and  carbon rich rainforests.

Because Cargill is both the largest supplier of palm oil to the US from Indonesia and the largest importer of palm oil into the US, we at RAN have a strong position to push the multinational to clean up their actions and adopt a global forest policy. Our impact over the past few months has been seen in the company agreeing to a series of three meetings with RAN running up to the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil in November.

But as with all the world’s natural resources, China has increasingly become the most dominant oil palm consumer nation. Too cold and dry to produce the crop on their own soil, Chinese business and government has turned to Indonesia to feed their demand for the cheap cooking oil and input for processed foods with so many ecological and social consequences.

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It isn’t every day that you get go on speaking tour in Minneapolis/St. Paul with a delegate from Papua New Guinea. Or to meet activists and students in a city full of bicycles and inspired, socially and environmentally active people and delightful local food co-ops. Or to witness the connection between the global and the local becoming as clear as what’s possible when we all work together…

The residents of Minneapolis/St. Paul are living near the fancy headquarters of Cargill, the very corporation that is leveling rainforests in Papua New Guinea to expand their palm oil plantations.
What a realization.

Matilda Pilacapio, human rights and environmental activist from Papua New Guinea

It was a deeply significant experience to hear Matilda Pilacapio’s powerful and poignant personal narrative of Cargill’s rainforest destruction in her community. It was heartbreaking to hear the devastation of traditional ways of life, of matrilineal land ownership, of communities held together by forest subsistence being ripped into unsustainable cycles of brutal plantation work, dismantled family structures, polluted rivers, lost ecosystems, undrinkable water, and deceptive contracts that trick people into giving up their ancestral land. It was sobering to hear that the corporation responsible for these atrocities is in the Twin Cities area, and that the people of Papua New Guinea and everywhere are counting on us to take action in our own communities to literally change the world. It was inspiring to realize that we can.
The positive aspect of globalization is that it has united people and information. We live in a time where it is possible to make ripples that reach literally around the world by affecting the corporations and institutions that are in our communities. What an incredible amount of agency we have as Americans.
It has never been clearer to me that as Americans, we have an opportunity (and a responsibility) to use that agency.
After Matilda’s lectures and slides of the effect of oil palm in Papua New Guinea, people would ask, “What can we do?” “I am hoping that you all will set up a strategy with RAN” Matilda said. Now, students and community members are stepping up to start a RAN- Twin Cities chapter. People have already started to raise awareness about oil palm and participate in Global Days of Action with 350.org to highlight the connections between Big Agriculture, deforestation, and climate change. In spite of being busy students, activists, and parents, people are making time to work on this important issue, largely because of the power of Matilda’s words! We are meeting tonight to figure out specifics of how community members want to make a difference here, and I am so excited and honored to see the brilliance of people here stepping it up in their own backyards to protect the land of people like Matilda and the climate we all share.

Hillary V Lehr is the Grassroots Action Manager for the Rainforest Action Network’s Forests Program.

A new report published in Environmental Research Letters uses precise satellite imaging to show that the pace of forest clearing in Indonesia steadily increased from 2000-2005. At the end of the team’s study period in 2005, the rate of deforestation had reached 1 million hectares per year, with 70% of that deforestation occurring in Sumatra and Kalimantan.

This is just the latest report to throw its glove into the Indonesian deforestation estimation gauntlet. In a part of the world where concrete facts are notoriously hard to pin down on the ground, and clouds always obscure satellites’ views from the air, there has been much controversy over Indonesian deforestation numbers.

The FAO’s State of the World’s Forests 2009 claims Indonesia has the world’s highest deforestation rate, with 1.87 million hectares lost per year from 2000 – 2009.

Another respected source, Global Forest Watch, a division of the World Resources Institute, reports that the correct number for Indonesian deforestation is 2 million hectares per year.

What is the importance of all this? For forest managers and policy makers, the difference of 2 million compared to 1 million is huge; it is the difference between running out of timber and the forests timber comes from in the next 20 years, or sometime over the next 50 years.  For traders interested in producing forest carbon credits, these discrepancies must leave them feeling shaky. If the world can not decide on a ballpark figure for the extent that Indonesia’s forests are being destroyed, how can they expect to accurately establish a national baseline of deforestation to use in their carbon credit accounting?

My take on all this is that accomplishing anything on the macro-level in Indonesia is hard, and the only truth we can be confident in is that the forest is receding fast, forest peoples are suffering, and we need to focus our actions on the ground, at the grassroots, to empower communities to protect their forests from oil palm and timber operations. In the long run it is irrelevant if it is 1 million or 2 million, oil palm and timber are not sustainable in Indonesia, and will raze, destroy, and denude the world’s 3rd largest tropical rainforest within a generation if no one stops 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.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, has frozen new investments in oil palm projects and is reviewing all current oil palm projects.

The IFC is a major player in development, and their recognition of the negative social and ecological impacts of oil palm is a significant signal to the industry that their harmful practices will no longer be tolerated.

The IFC did not initiate this action on their own; a major push from the Forest Peoples Program (FPP), Sawit Watch, and Lembaga Gemawan forced the IFC to acknowledge that they have violated their own internal standards when investing in the Wilmar Group, Indonesia’s largest oil palm producer.

As pointed out in  a report authored by the Forest Peoples Program, the IFC ignored negative reviews of Wilmar by the IFC’s own Compliance Advisory Ombudsman and pushed through a major loan package to the oil palm producer in October 2008.

The Ombudsman acknowledged complainants reports that Wilmar subsidiaries were illegally using fire to clear primary forests and high conservation value areas, in addition to seizing Indigenous peoples land without Free, Prior, and Informed Consent.

Another Indonesian forest is destroyed to make way for oil palm. Photo by David Gilbert

In response to their own errors, the IFC has promised to develop an Advisory Services program targeting the oil palm sector to support fair labor and land tenure practices, increase participation with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, increase protections for primary forests, and to send an IFC team to visit Wilmar’s plantations in Indonesia.

IFC’s increased vigilance of the impact of the oil palm industry is a great win for the forests and forests peoples of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Malysia. But as Marcus Colchester, director of the FPP, points out:

“Still, we remain somewhat exasperated. It has taken us more than five years to get the IFC to take these issues seriously. Given the urgency of halting forest loss and human rights abuses, we call on the IFC President to take personal proactive steps to ensure this never happens again.”

The full IFC and FPP reports can be found here.

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Update 2:

The following sentence appearing in the post above:

The Ombudsman acknowledged complainants reports that Wilmar subsidiaries were illegally using fire to clear primary forests and high conservation value areas, in addition to seizing Indigenous peoples land without Free, Prior, and Informed Consent.

has been changed from the original sentence below to better reflect the Ombudsman’s report:

The Ombudsman report states that Wilmar subsidiaries were illegally using fire to clear primary forests and high conservation value areas, in addition to seizing Indigenous peoples land without Free, Prior, and Informed Consent.

Update 1: The New York Times ran a story on the IFC report mentioned in this blog post, before the IFC took action to freeze funding for new oil palm projects. You can see the NYTimes article here.

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.