JAKARTA (From news reports)-- Activists have called on financiers and clients of Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), one of the world's biggest paper producers, to stop doing business with the company, citing alleged violations of its own sustainability commitments.
"APP is a wolf in sheep's clothing," said Sergio Baffoni, coordinator of a campaign by the Environmental Paper Network (EPN) to protect Indonesia's rainforests. "For years they have pretended to be a green champion, but their commitment to forest conservation and social responsibility remains empty words. Conflicts, intimidation and violence continue to ravage communities living in the areas exploited by APP and its suppliers."
The EPN has published a new report linking APP to deforestation, forest and peat fires, and social conflicts in its areas of operation in Indonesia. It also alleges APP failed to fulfill its promises to rehabilitate degraded peatlands and conserve rainforest.
Other criticisms leveled against APP include a failure to be truly transparent in its operations and the implementation of its sustainable policies, and a weakening of its criteria for assessing future suppliers.The report says these shortcomings are proof that due diligence by the buyers and banks doing business with APP have been ineffective, allowing the company to violate its own forest conservation and human rights pledges. As a result, conflicts and violence have continued unabated in the Indonesian regions where it produces and sources pulpwood for its paper production, EPN says.
The group has written to international banks, urging them to stop financing APP until a trustworthy independent third-party verification has demonstrated that APP and its affiliates have improved their practices, remedied past social and environmental harm, and met the demands made by the local and international NGOs detailed in the report.
"APP remains a highly controversial supplier of pulp and paper products to the global market," said Rusmadya Maharuddin, forest campaigner at Greenpeace Indonesia, one of the NGOs named in the report. "All buyers, financiers, banks and companies that continue to do business with APP and [parent company] the Sinar Mas Group are complicit in their abuses".
In response to the criticisms, APP says it remains firmly committed to its sustainability pledges and that it continues to make progress on those goals.
"This year, we announced new targets to meet as part of our Sustainability Roadmap Vision 2030," APP said in a statement. "We are not perfect and we value constructive criticism that will help us to improve. And as always, we have an open invitation for any concerned stakeholders to visit our operations, conduct their own evaluations and arrive at their own informed conclusions."
Deforestation and fires
APP committed to ending deforestation in its Indonesian concessions in 2013. While land clearing decreased after this, destruction of peatland from fires increased, the EPN report says, with APP's suppliers and sister companies involved in massive forest and peat fires throughout Indonesia in 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2020.
In 2015, the total area burned inside APP concessions in South Sumatra province was 293,065 hectares (724,179 acres), nearly three-fifths of which constituted carbon-dense peatland. In 2019, APP concessions in South Sumatra burned again, with a total affected area of more than 60,000 hectares (148,000 acres).
The EPN report attributes this repeated burning to the fact that APP continues to operate in fragile and highly flammable peat ecosystems.
"The fact is that plantations on drained peat become an extensive stock of fuel, and when a forest and peat fire starts there it is unstoppable," the report says. "This is why dried peat must be immediately re-wetted."
But instead of restoring the dried peatland to its original wet condition to prevent it from burning, APP remains heavily reliant on peatland plantations, the report says, with half of the concessions of its pulpwood suppliers being on peatland. Even with best-practice management, cultivating pulpwood plantations on drained peatlands is not sustainable, the report adds.
Greenpeace found 3,500 hectares (8,650 acres) of peatland that had been cleared in three concessions with ties to APP between August 2018 and June 2020. Peat clearing is typically done ahead of planting pulpwood trees such as acacia and eucalyptus.
Greenpeace also found 53 kilometers (32 miles) of drainage canals dug during the same period -- a deliberate practice to drain the moist peat layer in preparation for planting, but one that also renders the soil highly susceptible to catching fire.
APP has denied the allegations of peatland clearing by the three associated concession holders, saying it has had a strict policy in place since 2013 of not converting peatland and not burning. It said it has also implemented several programs to address fires in its concessions.
"While APP suppliers are prohibited from land clearance by fire, this does not mean that no fires will ever take place within concessions," the company said. "There are, however, still challenges on the ground due to the complexity of the land use within our suppliers' concessions. This can include villages located inside and around the concessions."
Restoration commitment
There's also the matter of rehabilitating and protecting degraded peat ecosystems, which the EPN says APP has promised to do but largely failed to deliver on.
In August 2015, APP committed to retire 7,000 hectares (17,300 acres) of plantations on peatland. But this represents just 1.2% of APP's total peat concessions, which cover 600,000 hectares (1.48 million acres), the report says.
"It would have been a good first step, if followed by a re-wetting of dried peat on a large scale," the report says. "This did not happen, and peat fires keep periodically ravaging."
APP says that since it retired the 7,000 hectares of peat plantations, it has been busy identifying the native tree species to protect and working with government and university researchers on restoration strategies. It says "further plantations on peatlands will be voluntarily retired and restored after they have been harvested," and touts a target of restoring 35,000 hectares (86,500 acres) of peatland over the course of 10 years.
In an earlier pledge, from 2014, APP said it would restore 1 million hectares of rainforest and other ecosystems in 10 landscapes in Indonesia. The aim was to remedy historical deforestation of natural forest caused by APP's operations. But that promise remains unfulfilled, with no clear plan and minimal progress on its implementation to date, according to the EPN report.
It says the only tangible achievement, besides the retirement of the 7,000 hectares of peat plantations, is the start of restoration work on 5,000 hectares (12,400 acres) of degraded forest, which represents only 1.2% of the million-hectare goal that APP has publicly committed to.
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