A
CASE STUDY OF A PALM OIL SUPPLIER IN INDONESIA
By
David
Gilbert
For
Rainforest
Action Network
=======================
BENGKAYANG, INDONESIA - A single, yellowed light bulb,
powered by a diesel generator, casts a faint glow on a young couple as they are
married in front of the community of Semunying Jaya. A shaman uses an eagle feather
to dab chicken blood on the wrists of the couple, then on every villager,
binding this community together in support of this new family.
As the shaman weaves through the crowd with his eagle
feather, the village chief, Pak Momonus, reminds his community of hunters,
forest gatherers and farmers that their Hutan Adat, or sacred forest, is the
source of everything that makes them Dayak, the group of native peoples that
are Indigenous to the island of Borneo. Then, his voice breaking, he tells his
community to not give up hope, to continue fighting “This is a forced system!”
Pak Momonus declares. “The boss of PT Ledo Lestari surely has a heart of plastic,
not a living heart like ours. That is why he can treat us and our forest this
way!”
A generation ago, when the elders of Semunying Jaya lived
a nomadic lifestyle in Borneo’s towering lowlands rainforests, this marriage ritual
promised stability. Now, with the arrival of oil palm, this couple’s future is
far from certain.
Duta Palma Nusantara, which owns at least 200,000 hectares
of land in Indonesia and is one of the country’s top ten oil palm producers, is
clearing and burning the rich rainforests surrounding Semunying Jaya at the oil
palm plantation PT Ledo Lestari, destroying an ecosystem of global importance
and threatening this community’s very survival.
Before Duta Palma began clearing, the rainforest here supported
one of the richest collections of biodiversity on earth.[i] The center of Semunying Jaya’s
forest was a watershed that fed the Semunying River and provided habitat to the
endangered Bornean orangutan, Asia’s great ape facing extinction within the
next twenty years.[ii]
In 2005, Duta Palma unloaded bulldozers and excavators
on the banks of the Kumba River next to Semunying Jaya. “They told us they were
here to build us a road,” Pak Jamaludin, the most outspoken of the villagers in
Semunying Jaya, tells me. “But then they started clearing our forest.” Unknown
to the community, the regional government had given Duta Palma a 20,000 hectare
land concession directly on top of all 18,000 hectares of Semunying Jaya’s
sacred forest.
Just minutes outside of the village, massive tree
trunks lay scattered across the barren landscape, red clay roads dividing the
palm plantation in orderly grids. Each hectare of this rotting rainforest
releases 500 to 900 tonnes of C02, making Indonesia the world’s third largest
emitter of climate-changing greenhouse gasses.[iii]
Although they have inhabited this area for generations,
the villagers of Semunying Jaya, isolated from urban centers and government offices,
hold no formal land titles. Their claim to the rainforests around them is based
in their multi-generational history of inhabiting this region. These customary
land rights, as they are known, have support from a large body of international
law, most notably the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,
a treaty both Indonesia and the U.S. have ratified. Pak Momonus echoes the
thoughts of many Indigenous peoples throughout the tropics: “Why do we need a
land permit letter? This is my people’s land, and we have our own traditions.”
Semunying Jaya is just 3 miles from the 1,000 mile
border that divides Indonesian Kalimantan from Malaysia; these borderlands have
been targeted for palm oil development by companies eager to open up the vast
jungles of the region, leading to large scale destruction and social conflict.
In March 2009, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights voiced concern that,
“Oil palm plantations continue to be developed on Indigenous peoples’ lands in
the Kalimantan border region …” and requested actors in the region to, “secure
the possession and ownership rights of local communities before proceeding
further.”[iv]
But the High Commissioner is still waiting for a
response to his concerns, and less than a mile from the center of Semunying
Jaya, PT Ledo Lestari continues to chop away at the community’s remaining
rainforest, and in the process is destroying villagers’ livelihoods.
“Before oil palm came we could earn two hundred, three
hundred dollars a month; now it is hard to earn even a dollar a day.” Pak
Jamaludin tells me as we look out over PT Ledo Lestari, a view of flattened
forest stretching to the horizon. “The forest provided us with many ways to earn
money: fish, honey, saps, resins, oils, game, Rattan vines. Now, there is no
more land, all of our rice paddies, our fruit orchards, everything our
grandparents left us is gone.”
There are just 8,000 hectares of rainforest remaining on
PT Ledo Lestari’s concession. Foreboding clouds of black smoke hang over Semunying
Jaya, reminding the villagers that the clearing continues. After the chainsaws and
bulldozers, Duta Palma laborers pour diesel fuel over the felled forest and set
it ablaze, lighting fires that smolder for days. It is illegal to set fires in
palm plantations in Indonesia, and the practice is strictly banned by the Round
Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), of which Duta Palma is a member.
Incredibly, Duta Palma began operations at PT Ledo Lestari
without all four of Indonesia’s key land use and land use change permits: the
IPK (for land clearing), the PHK (for forest use), the AMDAL (an environmental
impact statement), and an HGU (the palm plantation operation license).[v] Many locals in Semunying
Jaya believe it is the Indonesian Military’s thirty percent ownership of Duta Palma
that allows them to operate with such impunity.
Duta Palma has been a member of the RSPO since 2007.
With their membership, Duta Palma has made a commitment to uphold strict
corporate social responsibility policies, including protecting primary
rainforests and fairly compensating local communities for their communal lands.
In a complaint filed with the RSPO in July of 2009, a broad network of Indonesian
NGOs presented the case that Duta Palma routinely violates RSPO membership criteria
and has made no efforts at cleaning up their operations during their two years
of RSPO membership.[vi] Four
months later, the RSPO has still not responded.
With observers on the ground stretched thin, it is
unknown how many more of Duta Palma’s operations engage in the same illegal and
destructive practices as those at PT Ledo Lestari. But this is not an isolated
case; similarly illegal and unethical practices were documented at Duta Palm
operations in Sumatra in 2007.[vii] It is clear that as Indonesia
pushes to double their palm oil output by 2020 many more forests and
communities will be destroyed unless producers like Duta Palma are brought
under the rule of law.[viii] Meanwhile, in the U.S., palm
oil continues to find its way into consumer products such as snack foods, cosmetics,
detergents and increasingly, biofuels.
In this world dominated by corporate ownership, the oath
of support Semunying Jaya has taken for their newest married couple means
little. With almost no rainforest remaining and no job offers from Duta Palma,
the couple face a future of absolute poverty, an existence the resource rich
Dayak community had never known before oil palm.
- David Gilbert
October,
2009
[ii] Nellemann,
C. et al., The last stand of the orangutan – State of emergency: Illegal
logging, fire and palm oil in Indonesia’s national parks. United Nations Environment
Programme, GRID-Arendal, Norway. 2007
[iv] Consideration
of the reports submitted by state parties under Article 9 of the convention:
Indonesia. CERD/C/IDN/CO/3. UN Committee on the elimination of racial
discrimination 71st session. August 2007.
[v] Request
for Consideration of the Situation of Indigenous Peoples in Kalimantan,
Indonesia, under the UN CERD’s Urgent Action and Early Warning Procedures. UN
CERD 71st session. August, 2007.
[vi] Preliminary
grievance against the Duta Palma Group. Letter addressed to The General
Secretary of the RSPO. July, 4 2009.
[vii] Duta
Palma: The oil palm industry’s recipe for climate disaster. Greenpeace International.
2007
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