Greenpeace: Indonesian palm oil firm breaks promise, destroys forest

Jul 29, 2010, 10:31 GMT

Jakarta - Greenpeace on Thursday accused Indonesia's largest palm oil company of destroying rainforests and the habitat of the highly endangered orang-utan despite earlier commitments.

The global environmental group said that palm oil firms linked to agribusiness giant Sinar Mas Group were felling biodiverse rainforest despite repeated promises to end the practice.

'We've caught Sinar Mas red-handed destroying valuable rainforests, and breaching the limited promises it has made to clean up its act,' said Bustar Maitar, forest campaigner for Greenpeace South-East Asia.

'Sinar Mas has to be reigned in if there is to be a future for what's left of Indonesia's rainforests,' Maitar said.

Greenpeace's investigation into the operations of Sinar Mas, one the most notorious destroyers of Indonesia's rainforests, claims the company continues to break its own environmental commitments on protecting forests and peatland.

Greenpeace released recent aerial photographs showing the deforestation caused by Sinar Mas in two of its operations in Kalimantan on the island of Borneo.

The photographs show recent clearance of rainforest areas identified by a United Nations Environment Programme study as habitat for the highly endangered orang-utan.

Greenpeace called on Sinar Mas to make public maps of all its holdings, to enable a study of the areas considered most critical for biodiversity and climate protection.

'Until this group changes course, other businesses should have nothing to do with Sinar Mas,' Mastiar said.

Sinar Mas has promised to stop clearing high conservation value forests, a technical forestry term for forests that shelter endangered species or provide valuable natural services such as trapping greenhouse gases.

Several leading multinationals, including Unilever, Kraft and Nestle, have responded to Greenpeace's previous calls by ending their contract with Sinar Mas' palm oil unit PT SMART Tbk.

Environmentalists said deforestation and peatland destruction accounted for the vast majority of Indonesia's greenhouse gas emissions. They said Indonesia is the world's third-largest polluter after China and the US, mainly as a result of the ongoing destruction of its forests and their peat soils.