A palm oil mill effluent pond in West Kalimantan, Borneo. RAN’s Rainforest Agribusiness team spent three weeks last fall visiting some of Indonesia’s most controversial palm oil plantations. Click the photo to see more pics from the trip.

It may seem like a silly question: Can fruit cause more pollution than coal? But from the perspective of Indonesian waterways, the answer is most certainly yes.

According to Mukri Friatna, head of advocacy for WALHI (Friends of the Earth Indonesia), “Oil palm plantations ranked first as producers of pollutants, followed by mining companies.” WALHI released a report detailing its findings this past December.

This isn’t the first time that palm plantations and mining corporations have been in competition for the top spot on the list of environmental wrongdoers. As we witnessed while traveling through Borneo, palm and mining joint ventures join hands to plow down rainforests.

Any jungle that has the misfortune of growing atop coal, gold, and boxite reserves is liable to be “removed” to make room for massive mining operations. Once the valuable materials have been extracted, the dusty and nutrient-depleted soil is filled in and palm monocultures begin to expand across great expanses that were once tropical rainforests.

None of which excuses the coal mining industry for anything. WALHI’s findings reveal that while oil palm plantations are responsible for having polluted 31 of Indonesia’s rivers, coal companies dumped toxic waste and other dangerous waste products in 19 more. So even though palm plantations are the undisputed champion of poisoning Indonesia’s watercourses, coal mining is still a serious contender.

Overall, the report is impressively broad in scope. Unfortunately, it neglects to examine the climate impact of deforestation for food production. I wonder how that would add to the carbon footprint of the average American diet – quite a bit, I’d expect!

A Cargill Oil Palm Plantation - Photo Greenpeace PNG

Still, the authors’ recommendations for reducing your carbon “foodprint” are sound – and they would also contribute to reducing deforestation for food production:
• Eat fewer animals and more plants
• Buy unprocessed foods with less packaging
• Grow and harvest your own food
• Minimize car trips to restaurants and stores
• Cook at home more and eat out less
• Cook with efficient appliances and techniques
• Compost, recycle, and relish leftovers

Isn’t it nice that the same steps that are good for our health and our budget will also help the planet?

Yesterday, I learned that the state Land and Survey Department demolished 25 homes in Sebauh, near the city of Bintulu (on Malaysian Borneo). The state claims that the homes were illegally built on state land, but the department moved forward with the destruction despite the fact that the community’s land rights claim is still pending in the courts. (Sarawak’s legal system is bogged down with such cases, and they drag on for years. Our fact-finding team found multiple instances where homes or crops were demolished despite on-going legal disputes.)

The now homeless community members report that state officials intentionally destroyed all of their possessions during the demolition. In response, about a hundred community members have set up a blockade to prevent the rest of their homes from being bulldozed.

We’ll continue to monitor this situation and let you know what you can do to help. In the meantime, this is another reminder that we need to make sure that any palm oil that goes into the products we buy is produced in a manner that respects both the environment and human rights. Go to TheProblemWithPalmOil.org to take action and learn more.

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.

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

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 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.

Sime Sarby, the Malaysia palm oil processor, has just announced new plans to expand their factories in China in response to rapidly increasing demand, and their CEO expect Chinese demand to increase 100 percent over the next decade.

Efforts to increase the uptake of less harmful palm oil are finally beginning to show some market impact. Since 2008, 19 percent of crude palm oil sold on the global market carried the label of ‘sustainable palm oil’ from the RSPO, the foremost certification criteria for palm oil.

Granted, there are real concerns over the RSPO being used as no more than ‘greenwashing’ of dirty palm oil. Case in point is the recent announcement by New Britain Palm Oil,  an oil palm poducer with serious negative ecological and social impacts in Papua New Guinea, that they will sell $100 million of “sustainable oil palm” to the producer of Nutella.

But I would still argue that this 19 percent uptake of certified palm oil is at least a very small, and vary incremental step, in the right direction for the oil palm industry.

But Chinese importers and oil palm producers have shown little interest in increasing the sustainability of their oil palm, and Chinese consumers have not yet placed any demands on their domestic marketplace.

Since 2005, Chinese oil palm companies have been lobbying to create a massive palm oil development in the heart of Borneo’s last remaining tropical forests. Intense criticism from environmental and community rights groups has limited Borneo’s ‘Oil Palm Mega Project’, but the threat remains.

Its clear, to effectively slow forest destruction in Indonesia, new policy and advocacy strategies are needed to push China’s oil palm lobby towards a future of responsible oil palm development and engage Chinese consumers.

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

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.

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 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.

—

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.

During the meeting, we presented the findings from our fact finding mission – that Indigenous people are being systematically deprived of their land and other basic human rights through collusion between the state government and oil palm companies (with support from the local police).  I spoke about many of the specific abuses that I noted in my previous blog post, and I told them that Rainforest Action Network would support them in letting people know about their struggle and in trying to put pressure on US businesses to only buy palm oil from companies that respect Indigenous People’s rights.

Throughout the meeting and in conversations during the breaks, I heard more and more examples of abuses. 

Four different people told me that their communities had signed a joint venture agreement with the state investment agency (our “friends” at SALCRA) or a private company that promised them 30% of all profits. Many years later, none of these communities have received a single payment and they worry that they signed away their land for nothing. One man told me he thought that it was only his community that wasn’t being paid.

Many people also talked about going to court to try to protect their land rights and having the cases endlessly postponed or appealed.  There are 173 land cases pending in Sarawak right now, and while the courts drag their feet the companies go on operating on disputed territory and blocking Indigenous communities from accessing their own farmland.  This is the clearest example I’ve seen of justice delayed truly being justice denied.

Examples of abuse by the police were also common.  One woman who was trying to protect her land was sexually harrassed by male police officers who arrested her, despite the fact that Malaysian law requires a woman police officer to be present whenever a woman is arrested.  Naturally, her complaints to higher ups within the police department have not been answered.

Some people brought maps and legal documents to the meeting to ask what they should do.  Everybody present was angry and frustrated, but this meeting felt like the beginning of more joint action to address all of these common issues. Hopefully, by banding together, people can stand up to their abusive government and protect their land, their livelihood and their future.

After the meeting, I felt a bit like a presidential candidate, as 200 people lined up to shake my hand. But as I looked them each in the eye and thanked them, is was coming from my heart.

This is my final post before I return home from Malaysia. The people I met here have truly touched and inspired me, and I’ll do everything I can to share their story with the world.

We expected to receive a public relations presentation about how well Salcra is managing development and helping Indigenous communities in Sarawak, and we had a few questions ready to challenge those assertions. We were seated and given tea, fresh fruit and other snacks, along with a printout of the power-point presentation that was set up for the meeting. The boss came in and started shaking hands with members of the delegation and asking where we were from. When I said Rainforest Action Network, his eyes grew wide and he repeated “Rainforest?!” After meeting everyone, he left the room. Ten minutes later, his assistant came back and collected the presentation copies we’d been given (“Wrong version.”) and after waiting another twenty minutes, we were informed that the agency had only expected to meet with people from the Sarawak Dayak Iban Association (the Indigenous rights group that arranged our meeting) and that they would not go forward with the meeting while people from the international community were in the room. So… Salcra missed a prime opportunity to give us their side of the story and made it very clear that their operations can’t stand up to international scrutiny.

So now instead of telling you about the meeting, here’s some other news about Salcra. Last month, Salcra Chairman Tan Sri Alfred Jabu Numpang said that Western environmentalists used the media to tarnish Malaysia’s plantation reputation, particularly in Sarawak, without having any respect for the truth. He said that after blaming plantation activities for causing the destruction of the Orang Utan habitats, the latest accusation was that the land clearing for plantation purpose had contributed to increased emission of greenhouse gases and global warming. In fact, he says, oil palm plantations have had the opposite effect, and have not damaged the local ecology. (I wish I could’ve asked him about all of the fish poisoned in the rivers near the communities I visited.)

Salcra’s mandate includes developing all types of land in Sarawak, but their focus has been developing land where Native Customary Rights apply (meaning that the land belongs to the Indigenous community that has continuously cultivated it over a long period of time. Salcra and local politicians have pressured communities to agree to “joint ventures” with oil palm plantations, where communities essentially become (low) paid workers instead of landowners with control over their own land. This scheme subverts efforts by Indigenous communities to gain title to their land in perpetuity – instead, the joint venture company receives a title issued for a period of 60 years. Last night, I heard from another delegation member that one of the communities she met with had entered a joint venture on part of their land and continued to cultivate the other part of their land on their own. They found that they’re making much more money on the land they cultivate themselves – and they don’t have to sign away their rights to do it!

Thanks for the educational meeting, Salcra!

Community 1 had six houses destroyed by a logging company that had been granted a license to log the community’s territory by the state. In 2000, the community sued for their land rights and compensation for the houses. They won twice and both times the state appealed. They brought in a new judge for the third trial, and the community lost. While they appeal, the logging company continues taking trees from the disputed land. Over and over, we heard that companies continued to log or plant oil palm while lawsuits dragged on for years.

In 2004, Community 2 was given two months’ eviction notice by a company licensed by the state. The company cleared the community’s fruit palm and rubber trees (which would serve as proof that the land belongs to the community) and planted oil palm. Police arrested three women who protested and kept them in a room so dark that they couldn’t tell if it was night or day. Another community member was arrested for trying to get the names of the who had cleared their land. The community is still fighting the eviction and trying to get control of their land. In the meantime, the company has fenced in the disputed territory. The community can no longer gain income from fishing, because the river has become too polluted by the plantation’s pesticides.

Community 3 described how another oil palm company offered to start a joint venture giving the community 30% of the profits, if the community signed a memorandum of agreement. The agreement is in English and is “signed” with the thumb prints of the community members, who didn’t have their own lawyer and don’t speak or read English. The agreement says that they acknowledge that they are squatting on the company’s land and that they agree to dismantle their homes and move. In subsequent meetings, the company promised them a 50/50 split, but they haven’t gotten anything in writing and still fear that they’ll be forced to move.

In Community 4, the government granted a provisional lease to an oil palm company after a helicopter survey found no evidence that the community was cultivating the land. Of course, the helicopter couldn’t see their fruit trees, bamboo and other proof that they’ve used the land for generations under the taller tree cover.

When we visited Community 5, four residents were still in jail and one had just been released. Community members told us that the oil palm company had repeatedly sent gangsters to intimidate them and nearby communities to get them to sell their land. Many had sold out of fear. The community filed more than 20 police reports, but the police never did anything to protect them. Then, on April 14, the community headman was arrested for allegedly carrying a homemade pistol without a license (a charge the community members say is false). Other community members were asked to come in for questioning about the case, but they were arrested instead without being told the charges. You can read more about the case by clicking on the press release at the BRIMAS website.

Community 6 was given 21 days notice to vacate their land by another oil palm company. They’re fighting the eviction and hoping their selection as part of a United Nations Development Programme project will give them some leverage. There’s nowhere else for them to go, and they say there will be rioting throughout the country if people keep trying to kick Indigenous people off their lands.

Finally, Community 7 told us they can’t send their children to school because the government won’t issue identification cards to the parents (who don’t have birth certificates). This also means they can’t get jobs beyond cultivating their land. Like Community 3, they were offered a joint venture with the oil palm company and signed an agreement in English. The company told them not to cause a disturbance and everything would be taken care of, so they’ve been waiting since 2006 for their first compensation from the company.

Sorry for such a long blogpost. These communities are relying on us to get their story out to the public, so I felt a responsibility to tell you a little bit from each of the places that gave us so much hospitality and put so much faith in our ability to help make things right. I hope we can live up to that trust.

During my trip, I had lots of time to do some background reading. Here’s what I found out:

• Between 1990 and 2000, Malaysia lost an average of 78,500 hectares of forest per year. Between 2000 and 2005, the rate of forest destruction increased by 85.1%. The rapid increase in deforestation comes largely due to the expansion of oil palm plantations as that commodity has become a popular agrofuel (industrial-scale biofuel) option. Currently, Malaysia supplies about half of the world’s palm oil.
• Malaysia is one of the world’s leading carbon emitters – not because they’re a major industrial power, but because the rapid rate of deforestation is releasing all of the carbon that those forests had captured for centuries.
• The state of Sarawak is the largest state in the Malaysian federation located on the island of Borneo. Of the 2.2 million people in Sarawak, 60% belong to Indigenous groups collectively known as the Dayak people, who have settled in the area for centuries.
• The way that land rights work in Malaysia, Indigenous groups must prove that they have used the land continuously since 1958 in order to establish their right to the land. In addition to the problem of “proving” continuous use without official documentation, the Indigenous communities face the added challenge that their sustainable farming practices of leaving fields fallow for several years means that they often haven’t “continuously” used any particular patch of land. With the current interpretation of the land rights law, the state government has stopped approving applications for Communal Reserves and has granted 60 – 90 year leases and concessions known as Provisional Leases to logging and plantation companies; usually closely related to people in the governing elite; to exploit previously recognized Indigenous lands for logging and subsequent replanting with oil palm.
• The Dayak people won a victory last year when the Federal Court in Kuala Lumpur (the highest court in Malaysia) recognized the pre-existence of native customary rights over land before any statute or legislation. Despite the Federal Court decision, the state government continues to grant Provisional Leases to logging and plantation companies.
• Plantations are increasingly coming into conflict with Dayak communities, having been accused of desecrating graves, destroying cultural artifacts, stealing timber from communal forest reserves, and other transgressions.
• Native communities and leaders who act to protect their land rights are persecuted, arrested and imprisoned to try to get them to give up their claims to the land. The industry also sends thugs to industry to harass the local community.

Tomorrow, our delegation will head out to some of these threatened communities and find out more about what’s going on. I’ll try to post an update when we get back to Kuching on Tuesday. In the meantime, you can find out more about these issues and take action to support a moratorium on agrofuels at http://ran.org/campaigns/rainforest_agribusiness/.