Indonesia: Environmental Groups Question April Promises of Sustainable Pulp Practices

Ethan Harfenist Jakarta Globe 29 Jan 14;

Jakarta. Indonesia’s second-largest pulp and paper producer Asia Pacific Resources International Ltd. (April) announced a renewed pledge to sustainable practices this week, promising to stop expanding its plantation holdings by the end of this year and halt forest clearing entirely by 2019 in a move greeted with both cautious optimism and disbelief by environmental groups.

“This policy means that within five years April’s mill will be running entirely on renewable, sustainable plantation fiber,” April president Praveen Singhavi said at a press briefing in Jakarta. “We will reach the goal progressively over the next five years — and hopefully before the deadline.”

The Singapore-based April — which runs the region’s largest pulp mill under its Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP) subsidiary — announced the move on Tuesday, detailing an ambitious sustainability plan after more than a decade of criticism from environmental and animal rights groups over the company’s activities in the heavily deforested province of Riau, Sumatra.

Under the sustainability plan, April has committed to halting any efforts to establish new plantations by the end of 2014. During this time the company will also double its forest restoration program to 40,000 hectares. Five years later, April has committed to only using plantation wood in its mill, putting to an end more than a decade of relying predominately on mixed tropical hardwood harvested from the province’s existing forests.

The pulp and paper company and its affiliates currently own some 817,000 hectares of land throughout the country, 51 percent of which is suitable for planting. Nearly half of the company’s concession areas lie in Sumatra’s Riau province, an area that witnessed one of fastest rates of deforestation in the world. More than 4 million hectares of forest have vanished in Riau since 1982 — laying waste to vast tracts of forest, destroying valuable carbon-rich peatland and pushing several indigenous species to the brink of extinction.

Much of the blame has been placed on Royal Golden Eagle Group (RGE) and Sinar Mas — two companies with deep ties to the Suharto regime and a host of affiliated companies operating in the pulp and paper and palm oil industry in Indonesia and abroad. Sinar Mas owns one of the largest pulp companies in the world, Asia Pacific Pulp and Paper, and has made a similar pledge to sustainable practices last year. The company’s announcement began with the immediate suspension of all land clearing activities and a promise to only expand on open land and scrubland in future operations.

April was criticized at the time for sticking to its existing policies which, despite corporate claims that they are in the “tree planting” business, resulted in annual clearing of existing forests. In 2012, the company planned to clear some 60,000 hectares of rainforest, according to confidential reports leaked to Greenpeace. RAPP’s massive 1,750 hectare manufacturing complex in Kerinci, Riau, produces some 2.8 million tons of pulp and 820,000 tons of paper per year. Historically more than half of the wood used came from existing forests, not acacia plantations, according to reports by the Center on International Forestry Research (Cifor).

Now, a little over a year later, April has made a similar pledge to ending destructive practices in Indonesia. The move was met with “cautious” optimism by the Wold Wildlife Fund, which applauded the company’s plan to establish an independent advisory board to oversee the progress of the sustainability pledge.

“Given WWF’s longstanding calls for an end to the environmental abuses associated with the pulp and paper industry, April’s Sustainable Forest Management Policy would seem to be demonstrating willingness on the part of the company to transforming its operations,” said Efransjah, CEO of WWF-Indonesia. “If April truly fulfills the entire commitment in the policy, it will lead to a positive contribution to Indonesia’s forests, biodiversity, emission reductions and people.”

But the details of the plan, and the reticence to immediately suspend all land clearing activities in Indonesia, left some wondering what the coming year holds for Riau’s forests. The privately held company declined to detail the status of the nearly 417,000 hectares of plantable land it owns. Environmental groups like Greenpeace worry that April will rapidly expand its land holdings in the coming year only to spend the next five years chewing through wood harvested from existing forests in an ironic preparation for its sustainability goals.

“April’s carefully orchestrated policy announcement is essentially a license to continue forest clearance,” Zulfahmi, Greenpeace Southeast Asia Forest Campaigner, said in a press release. “A glaring weakness is that it would allow its current suppliers to continue to destroy forest and peatlands for nearly a year, and give it another six more years until it would stop using rainforest fiber at its mill.”

The company’s announcement also left out any mention of RGE-owned subsidiaries like Asian Agri and Toba Pulp Lestari — two companies also implicated in destructive practices like the kind of slash-and-burn land clearing that left Singapore choking on haze last year. Under the Ministry of Forestry’s regulations, companies that own both palm oil and pulp divisions can use wood cleared from new palm plantations to feed their pulp mills in an effort to reduce pulp deficits at the nation’s mills. Environmental groups have called for similar sustainability promises to be made by April’s sister companies.

Greenpeace called the move an eleventh-hour effort to retain its membership in the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The company’s membership was on the line unless it demonstrated a serious commitment to ending deforestation following a complaint by Greenpeace. But the environmental group criticized April’s response for not going far enough, explaining that a serious commitment to ending deforestation would be the immediate suspension of forest clearing.

“If April were serious about cutting forest destruction from their supply chains then it would look to more progressive players in the forestry sector that have put an immediate moratorium on all forest clearance and peatland development,” Zulfahmi said.

The Pekanbaru-based Forest Rescue Network Riau (Jikalahari) said the company had made and broken similar promises in the past.

“I don’t buy the pledge,” Muslim Rasyid, of Jikalahari, said on Wednesday. “They commit to ceasing using raw materials from nature by 2019 and lower their production so it can match the normal capacity, but I think they’ll break their promise again. They made similar pledges back in 2009 and 2012, but still, nothing’s changed. The pledge is only an act of green washing. The company just wants to create a good image of themselves and save their place in the network of sustainable companies.”

Previous efforts to establish a “greener” image by April have been met with similar criticism. Environmental groups accused the company of using a $17 million peatland restoration project in Riau’s heavily degraded Kampar Peninsula to “greenwash” the continued cutting of old-growth forests. The project, which aimed to restore more than 20,000 hectares of damaged peatland, was drafted in association with Fauna & Flora International (FFI). But April’s continued cutting of forests at the time, as well as the company’s seemingly cozy relationship with the forest ministry, left environmental groups doubting the true impact of the project.

The Ministry of Forestry claims that demand for Indonesian pulp remains strong. The success of April’s sustainability pledge depends on its ability meet demand, ministry spokesman Sumarto explained.

“The market demand for wood is still huge, so Indonesia has the potential to improve,” he said.

The ministry announced plans in 2012 to significantly expand the nation’s pulp capacity in the next decade. The expansion would include the construction of seven new pulp mills and the awarding of concessions in previously untouched forests in eastern Indonesia, according to the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). When asked about the status of this plan, Sumarto instead spoke on the importance of involving local residents in the cultivation of pulp plantations.

Some 70 percent of the nation’s pulp production comes from small farmers, not multinational companies, Sumarto said.

“The forest [ministry] will establish a wood industry with a focus on planted forests,” he said. “This included forests planted by the people. The conditions now show that forests planted by the people have a role [in the nation's pulp industry].”

Nationwide some 40 percent of Indonesia’s forest cover has been converted into plantations that feed a $26 billion a year industry. On average, 6.2 million acres — an area roughly the size of Vermont — of tropical forests disappear annually.

— Additional reporting by Muhamad Al Azhari and Josua Gantan