Sections of forest are being cleared for palm oil plantation expansion in Sumatra, Indonesia. Palm oil is widely used in common snack foods.
[This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.]
Picture a rhinoceros in the rainforest, add a herd of elephants, families of
orangutans swinging through the treetops and tigers prowling the understory,
and there is only one place in the world you could be.
Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem is one of Earth’s most ancient forest
ecosystems, a laboratory of life’s potential where the alchemy of evolution
has been allowed to experiment, uninterrupted for millennia. And the results
are astounding. Green upon green, vines hanging from towering old-growth
trees, moss growing on ferns growing on bromeliads… you get the picture.
It is the kind of place one imagines primeval nature to be wild, abundant,
impenetrable.
Tragically, undercover field investigations by my organization, Rainforest
Action Network (RAN), have exposed major global food brands — including
Unilever, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Mondelēz, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars and
Hershey — sourcing illegal palm oil grown within the nationally protected
Rawa Singkil Wildlife Reserve.
With more than a century of proud conservation history responsible for its
continued existence, the province of Aceh where the Leuser resides is,
against all odds, a sparkling ecological jewel standing in stark contrast to
the devastated landscape that surrounds it. Most of the rest of Sumatra —
once known as Indonesia’s “Emerald Island” — and sadly much of the rest of
lowland rainforests across Indonesia, too, have been exploited and denuded
by wave after wave of scorched Earth, industry, colonial extraction and
modern-day corrupt corporate greed. What has already been lost is
incalculable, but here, in this special place, remains a rare opportunity to
stop the cycle of destruction and protect a globally valuable treasure
before it’s too late.
The Leuser Ecosystem is considered the heart of Southeast Asia’s rainforest
region, which, alongside the Amazon and the Congo Basin, is one of only
three tropical forest regions on Earth. The beating heart of the Leuser is
the lowland forests and peat swamps of the Singkil-Bengkung region. This
area is part of the last remaining healthy peat swamp ecosystem in western
Sumatra. This lush jungle contains some of the world’s richest levels of
biological diversity.
The lowland peat forests of the Leuser Ecosystem deserve the highest levels
of protection for multiple critical reasons. Dubbed the “orangutan capital
of the world,” this region is home to the highest population densities of
critically endangered orangutans anywhere. This includes a special,
culturally distinct subpopulation of a few thousand individuals in the
Singkil-Bengkung region, which demonstrate social structures and tool-using
behaviors unique from all other orangutan populations. These forests are
also home to some of the healthiest remaining breeding populations of highly
imperiled Sumatran elephants, rhinos and tigers.
The health of the Leuser Ecosystem’s Singkil-Bengkung landscape is
internationally significant because its deep, carbon-rich peatlands are
among the most valuable and effective natural carbon sinks on Earth.
Conversely, when drained, cleared and burned for conversion to palm oil
plantations, this soil type is transformed into a carbon bomb that emits
catastrophic levels of pollution into the atmosphere.
Hundreds of thousands of people rely on the area’s rich natural resources as
the basis of their livelihoods. Downstream villages are already suffering
severe, sometimes deadly threats from devastating floods, landslides, and
the loss of subsistence resources like fish and forest products as a direct
result of the rapid rates of deforestation caused by palm oil. Communities
also continue to suffer due to the loss of access to their customary lands
that have been taken over by palm oil companies, without their consent, and
failures of the government to take decisive action to resolve conflicts and
restore to communities the rights to their lands.
The Acehnese people have fought for over a century to protect the integrity
of the Leuser Ecosystem’s extraordinary forests, and in the past decade the
Leuser has become internationally famous for its intact expanses of verdant
trees and its stunning wealth of imperiled wildlife species. But also over
the past decade, more than 18,000 hectares of forests within the
Singkil-Bengkung region have been cleared, leaving roughly 250,000 hectares
of rainforests remaining — and this area decreases each and every year due
to deforestation and the drainage of peatlands.
RAN conducted a series of undercover investigations in 2019 due to the
alarming destruction of peat forests occurring within the lowland
rainforests of the Leuser Ecosystem. The field research was conducted to
determine if the forest clearance was being driven by major snack food
brands, even though these brands had adopted policies years ago to end
deforestation in their supply chains.
The results of the investigations are definitive. Palm oil is being grown
illegally inside the nationally protected Rawa Singkil Wildlife Reserve, and
it is being sold to mills that provide the palm oil used to manufacture
snack foods sold across the world by Unilever, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Mondelēz,
General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars and Hershey.
These mills are located immediately next to areas of illegal encroachment
into the Leuser Ecosystem and lack the necessary procedures to trace the
location where the palm oil they sell is grown, a key requirement for
complying with the No Deforestation, No Peatlands, No Exploitation policies
to which all of these brands have publicly committed.
Progress has been made by some companies implementing their No Deforestation
policies. Brands like Unilever and Nestlé, for example, have begun the
process of increasing supply chain transparency by publishing the mills they
source from, but they have not yet achieved traceability to the plantation
level, so they remain unable to offer certainty as to exactly where the palm
oil they consume was grown. The findings of these investigations clearly
show that paper promises are not enough to keep the forests from falling.
The Leuser Ecosystem at large, and the Singkil-Bengkung region in
particular, still offer a rare and fleeting opportunity to get it right and
avoid the devastating mistakes made throughout so much of Indonesia in the
past. It remains possible here to prevent the destruction of habitat that
drives iconic wildlife species toward extinction, to avert the human
suffering from inevitable floods and landslides caused by deforestation, and
to end the reckless burning of carbon-filled peatlands contributing to the
climate crisis.
The international attention resulting from the release of this latest report
has helped to pressure the brands to respond and take further action, but
the high stakes and urgent threats to the Singkil-Bengkung demand more bold,
decisive action to ensure that the area receives permanent protection.
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