Jakarta Globe, Arti Ekawati & Reuters | July 30, 2010
A photo taken as part of a media trip organized by Greenpeace shows a forest area under development for palm oil plantations in West Kalimantan. The conservationist group is campaigning against palm oil expansion in forests, some of which are home to endangered orangutans. (Reuters Photo)
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Indonesia. Greenpeace on Thursday went into attack mode again, saying it had photographic proof that palm oil firms linked to Indonesian agrobusiness giant Sinar Mas are bulldozing rainforests and destroying the habitat of endangered orangutans in Kalimantan.
Sinar Mas, which lost top customers like Unilever and Nestle after an earlier Greenpeace allegation that it was destroying virgin forests, countered that it was working on government-awarded concessions that were already degraded before it began .
After Greenpeace’s earlier report, Sinar Mas group’s palm oil unit, PT SMART, which manages producers PT Agro Lestari Mandiri and PT Bangun Nusa Mandiri, ordered an independent audit of their operations in Central and West Kalimantan, but announcement of the results has been postponed twice and is now scheduled for Aug. 10.
Greenpeace said aerial photographs taken in July by its own photographers, as well as Reuters, showed that Agro Lestari was still clearing carbon-rich peat land forests in the Ketapang district of West Kalimantan.
The group also published photographs allegedly showing Bangun Nusa clearing an area in Ketapang that had been identified by the United Nations Environment Program as a habitat for highly endangered orangutans.
“What we found was that, despite their commitment, high levels of carbon destruction are still going on,” Greenpeace forest campaigner Bustar Maitar said.
“This is still happening, even while their auditor is writing the report,” he added.
Fajar Reksoprodjo, a spokesman for SMART, told Reuters that because the concessions it operated were granted by the government, “presumably the issuance for that is because it’s not deemed by the government as high conservation value.”
He also said that in the past, Greenpeace had misinterpreted areas in aerial photographs.
“What was thought by layman’s or non-expert eyes as peat turned out to be mineral soil. They have the same coloration,” he said.
SMART acknowledged in a statement received by the Jakarta Globe that the pictures were taken in the company’s concession area in Kapuas Hulu, West Kalimantan, but stressed that they should not be interpreted as a deforestation of a primary forest.
“We are not responsible for the opening of primary forests, which are high conservation value areas and the main habitat for orangutans,” said Daud Dharsono, president director of Sinar Mas Agro Resources and Technology, a plantation unit.
“Instead, our concession area consists of nonprimary forest.”
The company also stated it was conserving some areas of degraded forest that still had high conservation value.
“The green areas shown in the photograph are proof that the company conserves these areas. [The areas are] not the remains of primary forest damaged by SMART’s activity,” Daud said.
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