Indonesia: Mother Jones on the destruction brought by Palm oil / biofuels

Is there any hope for Indonesia’s rainforests and the people who depend on them? To answer that question, I visit an older oil palm plantation, Perseroan Terbatas Bumi Pratama Khatulistiwa. It’s owned by Wilmar and located in the coastal district of Pontianak, near the village of Mega Timur. This terrain used to be tropical peat land forest, but in 1996, Wilmar began razing the groves and digging deep canals to drain the soil. Now the land is a uniform grid of oil palms

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According to Greenpeace, the destruction and degradation of Indonesian
peat lands releases 4 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas
emissions. Unlike the Dayak of Pareh, the peasants of Mega Timur
welcomed the plantation, seeing it as their ticket to a better life.
Many families agreed to surrender their land to Wilmar; each received
in exchange a smaller plot sown with palm, with the cost of the
planting passed on to the family in the form of a loan.

This is a common arrangement that somewhat resembles sharecropping: The peasants are obliged to sell their harvest to the company at a set price, regardless of the market rate. The Wilmar plantation siphons off half the money as payments on the planting loans; it also deducts fees for roads and drainage systems, fertilizer and pesticides, harvest collection, security and administrative charges, and a deposit into a mandatory savings account.

After almost a decade of working with the company, none of the smallholders I talk to know how much they’ve earned, how much they’ve saved, or what portion of their loans they’ve paid. They do know, however, that floods are common now that the wetlands are gone. Several times a year their fields are submerged, sometimes for weeks on end.

Wilmar is currently under scrutiny for illegalities at three other plantations, including logging protected areas, using fire to clear trees, forcibly removing peasants and indigenous people, and operating without proper permits. These activities violate Wilmar’s own social responsibility policies, as well as the standards of the Round table on Sustainable Palm Oil, an industry-led oversight group the company belongs to, and the international Finance Corporation, a World Bank agency that has provided Wilmar tens of millions of dollars. After considerable pressure from Indonesian activists, both agencies have launched investigations.

The industry group’s probe ended last year after Wilmar promised to make improvements. My last stop in Indonesia is the Center for International Forestry Research, a serene, wooded compound where more than 100 top scientists are working out ways to protect the world’s forests and their peoples. Researcher Herry Purnomo is part of
an international team that has devised a plan to pay developing
countries to leave the trees standing.

Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/03/why-biofuels-are-rainforests-worst-enemy#comment-149915