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Australian companies accused of jeopardising conservation in Indonesia
The Guardian (Australia) - March 24, 2014
Western Australia-based mining firm Prosperity Resources has been granted a 41,000-hectare area to explore for gold and copper on the edge of the prized Leuser ecosystem in Sumatra.
Conservation groups are fighting an increasingly bitter battle against a plan to strip protection from a vast area of the 2.2m hectare Leuser ecosystem, which is the last place on Earth where tigers, elephants, tigers and orangutans are found within the one area.
A new spatial plan drawn up by the regional Aceh government, currently being evaluated by the Indonesian government, will open up much of the forest for mining, palm oil cultivation and logging. Environmentalists claim the plan is illegal and have urged the European Union to mediate to ensure conservation law is applied.
"If the Indonesian central government approves Aceh's spatial plan, the Sumatran elephant, tiger, rhino and orangutan will be pushed to extinction," said Dr Ian Singleton of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme. "There is no question that we will see them all disappear in less than a lifetime unless this spatial plan is rejected."
Prosperity Resources' website states that its "high potential" Sumatran holding covers an "underexplored yet potentially highly prospective mineralised belt" in Aceh. The land has been granted under the controversial new spatial plan.
The company has struck an agreement with an Indonesian firm, Atjeh Investments, to fast-track development of the gold and copper project. As part of the deal, six other Indonesian firms will work on exploration work on behalf of Prosperity Resources.
An Aceh-based environmental campaigner, who did not want to be named, told Guardian Australia that Prosperity Resources and Canadian firm East Asia Minerals were actively lobbying the government to open up protected areas.
"Parts of the Leuser ecosystem could be facing wholesale destruction in a key biodiversity area that's the last lowland forest left in Sumatra," he said.
"This is pretty much one of the last habitats left for the Sumatran elephant and we're already seeing the impact of increased poaching. Prosperity Resources' concessions overlap those of other mining firms and it seems some companies are trying to operate before the plan has been approved."
Two other Australian firms – Office Brands and Office Choice – have also come under fire from activists keen to protect dwindling Indonesian rainforests. Both companies stock the PaperOne product supplied by Indonesian pulp and paper company April, which has been criticised over its logging practices.
In August last year, April was stripped of its Forest Stewardship Council certification, with the company warned in January that will be expelled from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development unless it demonstrated it was not involved in deforestation.
In January, it unveiled a new sustainable forestry plan in which it committed to stop buying from suppliers that sourced material from high conservation value forests.
In an email, Racquel Collard, the marketing manager of Office Brands, said the company had "previously undertaken a thorough investigation to ensure that our paper suppliers, such as April, are producing paper products using sustainable practices, and April does comply."
Responding to complaints on its Facebook page over the stocking of PaperOne, Office Choice said it was aware of the "controversy in the paper industry" and pointed to April's new sustainability policy.
WWF has welcomed April's new policy but said customers should still not buy paper from the company. "The plan is not good or strong enough for us to recommend buying April's paper," Aditya Bayunanda of WWF Indonesia told Guardian Australia. "Things are improving in pulp and paper here but this plan has big loopholes. April won't use plantation-only wood until 2019, which is disturbing to us."
Guardian Australia approached Prosperity Resources, Office Brands and Office Choice for comment, but received no response.
In a statement, April said: "We will reduce the use of non-plantation fibre between now and 2019 and ensure that it comes only from non-high conservation value forest [HCVF] areas. We've conducted 36 HCVF assessments since 2005.
"We've set aside 250,000 hectares in conservation zones as a result. This work is time consuming and costly. This is why we have not yet become entirely plantation-sourced."
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