by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 26, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
Forests are falling across Borneo. A new videoblog by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Telepak have documented the loss of one such forest in Indonesian Borneo, and its impact on the indigenous Dayak Benuaq people.
Tensions hit a high point last year as PT Munte Waniq Jaya Perkasa, a company owned by Malaysia-based TSH Resources, began clearing the forest backed by police and other security personnel. The video highlights the contrast between the Dayak Benuaq’s standing forest and reforestation project and the recently cleared area for plantations.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 18, 2012 | The Problem: Civilization
By Agence France-Presse
Indonesia on Saturday accused five Chevron employees of being involved in a scam to set up a fictitious green project that lost the state some $270 million, a charge denied by the US oil giant.
“The Attorney-General’s Office (AGO) has named seven suspects, five of whom are from Chevron,” the office said in a statement on its website.
“Provisional estimates show losses of around $270 million,” it said, adding the project appeared to be fictitious. But Chevron denied the allegations, saying that the land restoration project was “up and running.”
The attorney-general did not disclose the nationalities of the Chevron suspects.
The other two suspects were from government agency, the Indonesian Upstream Oil and Gas Agency, and had been questioned, said the AGO.
The case centres on a project on Sumatra island, in which Chevron’s Indonesian subsidiary was to clean up soil contaminated by its drilling activities.
Under a government programme, Chevron would be reimbursed for the work by the oil and gas agency.
According to Chevron, it paid two companies to carry out the project, but investigators said they believed the land restoration was never carried out.
The two companies — Green Planet Indonesia and Sumigita Jaya — did not meet technical classifications or hold the right certificates to engage in land restoration, according to the AGO statement.
“The two companies are listed as general companies or contractors. It seems that the project is fictitious, that no work has been done in the area,” the statement said.
Chevron Pacific Indonesia denied the allegations.
“What we know is that the two companies meet the regulations we’re aware of,” company spokesman Yanto Sianipar told AFP.
“We are working on eight small sites that are around 200 metres by 150 metres each, and we have been working on the project for years now.”
The company says it is the largest producer of crude oil in Indonesia, recording an average daily production of 477,000 barrels in 2010.
Chevron is facing enormous fines for environmental destruction in Latin America, where it is challenging a landmark court order in Ecuador and could face fines from the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro for a November oil spill.
From Google News:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 1, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Fiona Harvey / The Guardian
The habitat of the endangered Sumatran tiger is being rapidly destroyed in order to make tissues and paper packaging for consumer products in the west, new research from Greenpeace shows.
A year-long investigation by the campaigning group has uncovered clear evidence, independently verified, that appears to show that ramin trees from the Indonesian rainforest have been chopped down and sent to factories to be pulped and turned into paper. The name ramin refers to a collection of endangered trees growing in peat swamps in Indonesia where the small number of remaining Sumatran tigers hunt.
Chopping down these trees is illegal under Indonesian law dating back to 2001, because of their status as an endangered plant species. But Greenpeace alleges that its researchers found ramin logs being prepared to be transported for pulping. The company tested logs in lumber yards belonging to the paper giant Asian Pulp and Paper, on nine separate occasions over the course of a year, and sent them to an independent lab to be tested. Out of 59 samples, 46 tested positive as ramin logs.
Asian Pulp and Paper denied wrongdoing. The company said in a statement: “Asia Pulp & Paper group (APP) maintains a strict zero-tolerance policy for illegal wood entering the supply chain and has comprehensive chain of custody systems to ensure that only legal wood enters its pulp mill operations. APP’s chain of custody systems are independently audited on a periodic basis. This ensures that we only receive legal pulpwood from areas under legal license that have passed all necessary ecological and social assessments.
“APP’s chain of custody system traces the origin of raw material, evaluates its legal and environmental status, to minimise the risk of contamination and to ensure that endangered species are protected – in accordance with the laws of Indonesia.”
The same hardwoods that grow in the Sumatran peat swamps where the tiger lives have also been independently verified to exist in paper products found on supermarket shelves, including photocopying paper, packaging for consumer products such as tissue paper.
Because the amounts of this pulp found in the paper samples are so small, it is impossible to say that they also contain ramin. However, independent lab tests confirmed the presence of “mixed tropical hardwoods” in paper samples from a wide variety of consumer outlets in the west. This shows that valuable rainforest trees are being turned into everyday items bought by unsuspecting consumers.
These fibres are highly likely to come from the same log yards examined by Greenpeace, because once pulped these rainforest trees are widely disseminated to packaging suppliers.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/01/indonesia-tiger-habitat-pulp-paper-greenpeace
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 22, 2012 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Environmental Investigation Agency
MUARE TAE, Indonesia — The fate of a Dayak community deep in the interior of East Kalimantan demonstrates how Indonesia must safeguard the rights of indigenous people who practise a sustainable lifestyle if it is to meet ambitious targets to reduce emissions from deforestation, alleges an organisation that specialises in investigating environmental crimes.
The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) claim Dayak Benuaq of Muara Tae, in West Kutai Kabupaten, today face a two-pronged assault from palm oil companies aggressively expanding into their ancestral forests. Together with Indonesian NGO Telapak, the community is manning a forest outpost around the clock in a last ditch attempt to save it from destruction.
The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has witnessed at first-hand the Dayak Benuaq’s struggle, and how their sustainable use of forests could help Indonesia deliver on its ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
EIA Forests Team Leader Faith Doherty said: “There are more than 800 families in Muara Tae relying on the forests for their food, water, medicine, culture and identity. Put simply, they have to keep this forest in order to survive.
“The rhetoric from the President of Indonesia on curbing emissions by reducing deforestation is strong but on the front line, where indigenous communities are putting their lives at risk to protect forests, action is sorely missing.”
President Yudhoyono has pledged to reduce carbon emissions across the archipelago by 26 per cent by 2020 against a business-as-usual baseline, alongside delivering substantial economic growth.
Plantation expansion will inevitably be a significant element of growth, but it has historically been a major driver of emissions and it is widely acknowledged that in order avoid them, expansion must now be directed to ‘degraded’ lands.
The EIA believe that as a result of weak spatial planning, however, the forests of Muara Tae are identified as ‘APL’, a designation meaning they are not part of the national forest area and are open to exploitation. The EIA claim the theft of indigenous forests also raises serious questions as to what form of ‘development’ these plantations offer.
In indigenous communities such as the Dayak Benuaq of Muara Tae, Indonesia has perhaps its most valuable forest resource. It is due to their sustainable methods, honed over generations, that the forest even remains.
The remaining forest is home to a large number of bird species including hornbills, the emblem of Borneo. There are about 20 species of reptiles and it is also a habitat for both proboscis monkeys and honey bears.
From Gáldu
