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Jakarta. Greenpeace on Thursday issued fresh accusations that palm oil firms linked to Indonesian agribusiness giant Sinar Mas have bulldozed rainforest and destroyed endangered orangutan habitats in Kalimantan.

Sinar Mas group’s palm oil unit, PT SMART, lost top customers Unilever and Nestle after earlier Greenpeace allegations of virgin forest destruction.

SMART has promised to stop clearing high conservation value forests, a technical forestry term meaning forests that shelter endangered species or provide valuable natural services such as trapping climate-warming greenhouse gases. SMART said it will publish an audit of its operations on August 10.

SMART manages Indonesian palm oil firms PT Agro Lestari Mandiri and PT Bangun Nusa Mandiri. The parent company for SMART, ALM and BNM is Singapore-listed Golden Agri-Resources, which is part-owned and led by the Widjaja family that controls Sinar Mas.

Greenpeace said in a report released on Thursday that aerial photographs taken in July by their own photographers, as well as by a Reuters photographer, showed that ALM was still clearing carbon-rich peatland forests in Ketapang district, in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province.

“What we found was that, despite their commitment, high carbon destruction is still going on,” said Greenpeace forest campaigner Bustar Maitar.

“This is still happening, even while their auditor is writing the report.”  

Enormous amounts of greenhouse gases are emitted when peatland forests are cleared and drained. Their preservation is seen as crucial to preventing runaway climate change.

Greenpeace also published photographs which it said showed BNM clearing in an area in Ketapang that was identified by the United Nations Environment Program as habitat for highly endangered orangutans.

Fajar Reksoprodjo, a spokesman for SMART, told Reuters that all concessions it operated were granted by the government.

“We are working based upon what the government has allocated for us. Presumably the issuance for that is because it’s not deemed by the government as high conservation value,” he said.

He said that in the past, aerial photographs that appeared to show clearing in peatlands had been misinterpreted.

“What was thought by layman’s or non-expert eyes was peat, turned out to be mineral soil. It has the same colouration.”  

SMART originally said it would release its audit in July but delayed it to the second week of August because it was not yet finished.

The auditors are paid by SMART and were selected in collaboration with Unilever, which chairs the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), an industry body made up of producers, consumers and non-government organizations.

Agribusiness giant Cargill Inc has threatened to delist Sinar Mas as a supplier if the RSPO validates allegations of improper land conversion in earlier Greenpeace reports.


Reuters