Jakarta Globe, Silvia Giannelli, November 16, 2013
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Sesaot, where a village committee has managed a forest reserve extending 3,600
hectares for over 50 years. (IPS Photo/Amantha Perera) |
Indonesia’s
rainforests are facing “legal land grabs,” nongovernmental organizations have
alleged. Its ancient communities are finding that ancestral lands are slipping
into the hands of foreign companies for oil palm cultivation, as demand for the
product grows in Europe, India and China.
“There are
33,000 villages in Indonesia’s forest zone and many thousand more in areas
marked for agriculture,” said Marcus Colchester, a senior policy adviser at
Forest Peoples Program, an international NGO.
“The
government allocates these areas to companies without even consulting the
communities. So concessions have been handed out over lands where these
communities have lived for hundreds or even thousands of years,” he told IPS.
On Friday,
Colchester flew to Medan to present the findings of his research, carried out
in conjunction with two local organizations, on the impact oil palm cultivation
has on the lives of Indonesian communities.
“It is
being left to the conscience of the companies — whether they want to give a
fair deal to the communities and recognize their rights or not,” Colchester
said.
“What our
study shows is that the communities’ rights are not being adequately
recognized. The people lose access to the land they have traditionally depended
on for forest produce, for hunting, fishing, medicines, agriculture and many
other purposes.”
According
to Sawit Watch, an Indonesian network against palm oil plantations, the country
already has 3.2 million hectares of oil palm plantations, mainly located in
Sumatra.
Oil palm is
known as ‘Sawit’ in Indonesia. Every year, 330,000 hectares of forest is
targeted for conversion into new plantations and 650 investors, 75 percent of
which are foreign companies, apply to convert forests into oil palm
plantations, according to the network.
Palm oil
companies and the government are both involved, alleges Augustin Karlo Lumban
of Sawit Watch.
Companies
first ask communities to release their lands, saying they are taking it [to]
rent, he said. But later, when the same people want the land back, they are
told it belongs to the state. The government, in turn, puts a business permit
on the land and gives it to companies.
“This is
land grab[ing] by legal means,” Lumban told IPS.
For some
time, the palm oil industry has been criticized by human rights and
environmental organizations for its operations in Indonesia.
It has also
triggered a debate in the scientific and political arena.
Mark
Winslow, communication consultant at the International Crops Research Institute
for the Semi-Arid-Tropics, an organization that works on sustainable ecological
farming, says there are many ways of producing palm oil.
“Palm oil
is generally considered the most energy-efficient biofuel and has the highest
yield per unit of land area. The problem is that its cultivation is carried out
in a very sensitive ecological area — Indonesia and Malaysia,” Winslow told
IPS.
But there
are alternatives to land grabbing, Winslow said. Data from the World Resources
Institute shows that there is at least six million hectares of degraded land in
Indonesia.
“These
lands are not used at all because they are covered in dense grass called ‘alang
alang,’ but if you use herbicides to kill it, you could then plant oil palms
there without clearing any new forest,” he said.
Also,
rainforests are not the only option for oil palm plantations. “The oil palm is
a forest tree by nature, but it has potential to expand into drier areas which
have a lot of rivers, or underground water, especially in Africa,” Winslow
said.
Oil palm is
an edible crop. Its cultivation has gone up vastly over the last decade, reaching
50 million tons in 2012 to become the leading vegetable oil in terms of
production and trade, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations (FAO).
In 2011,
Indonesia and Malaysia accounted for 85 percent of worldwide palm oil
production.
According
to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, 80 percent of palm oil is used
for food, the rest is used in oleochemistry, for products like cosmetics and
soaps, and increasingly, for biofuels.
After India
and China, Europe is the third top importer of palm oil, according to FAO data
for 2011.
As part of
the so-called “20-20-20″ climate and energy targets, the European Union aims to
raise the share of its energy consumption from renewable sources to 20 percent
by 2020, out of which 10 percent is for the transport sector, according to
European Commission data.
While this
directive has made the projection for future palm oil import higher, signs of a
course reversal are coming from the European Parliament.
“In
September, the European Parliament adopted a position that caps
first-generation biofuels, stating that within the 10 percent target of
renewable source, only six percent can come from first-generation biofuels,”
Bas Eickhout, a member of the European Parliament with the Greens, told IPS.
But no
measure is in sight as far the social impact of biofuels like palm oil is
concerned.
“As far as
including social standards in the sustainability criteria goes, unfortunately
the European Union is not moving at all,” Eickhout said.
The
Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is an organization that represents
all stakeholders throughout the industry supply chain.
“RSPO is
not yet ready to show that palm oil is sustainable in climate terms,” said
Colchester.
When it
comes to the social dimension, RSPO certification should be enough to prevent
human rights abuses.
“It would,
if they were complying,” Colchester said. “=Our report shows that even
companies that are members of the RSPO and are certified still have problems in
the way they deal with the communities,” he said. “And that’s what is so
shocking.”
Inter Press Service
