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.

Yesterday, in Kuching, our fact finding team meet with 200 leaders from Indigenous communities around the state of Sarawak. Some had traveled by boat to attend, some had traveled 8 hours or more.  The meeting was sponsored by SADIA, the Sarawak Dayak Iban Association (an Indigenous peoples network), and they had only expected about 150 participants, but word got out and there was a lot of interest.

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.

This morning, our international fact finding team in Malaysia was scheduled to meet with officials from the Sarawak Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority (Salcra), the state agency that officially works to alleviate poverty and improve the socio-economic status of rural communities, but in reality has led the expansion of oil palm plantations and owns a share of many of the companies.

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!

I just returned to Kuching after visiting with seven Indigenous communities in northern Sarawak (in Malaysian Borneo). What we saw was a tragic and infuriating picture of collusion between the state government and oil palm and logging companies to cheat, harass, intimidate, arrest and displace the people who have lived on and cultivated this land for generations. In one community, about a hundred people greeted us and the headman gave a speech saying we were “like gods sent from heaven” to help them.

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.

I just arrived in Kuching, Malaysia, after 20 grueling hours of travel from San Francisco. I’m here to take part in a fact finding mission organised by Sarawak Dayak Iban Association (SADIA), Tenaganita, People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS) and Pesticide Action Network Asia-Pacific (PAN AP). Over the next week, we’ll be visiting communities threatened by proposed palm oil plantations to learn more about what’s happening and find out what we can do to help. We’ll also meet with Malaysian advocacy groups and hold a couple of press conferences to call attention to the threats posed by palm oil expansion.

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/.