July, 06 2010, 12:06pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
San Francisco: Rolf Skar, Greenpeace Senior forest campaigner:
415.533.2888
Jakarta: Bustar Maitar, Greenpeace Southeast Asia
Forest Team Leader:
+62.8134.4666.135
New Report Links Sinar Mas Group, Major Brands to Rainforest Destruction
Palm Oil and Paper Giant Sinar Mas Set to Undermine Indonesia’s Plan to Curb Deforestation and Climate Pollution
JAKARTA, INDONESIA/SAN FRANCISCO
A new Greenpeace report
shows how global brands are fueling climate change and pushing Sumatran
tigers and orangutans towards the brink of extinction by using paper
made from Indonesian rainforest destruction.(1)
The report, How Sinar Mas
is Pulping the Planet, traces the connection from Asia Pulp and
Paper (APP)(2), the paper subsidiary of the notorious Sinar Mas group,
to major international brands.
Rolf Skar, Greenpeace senior forest campaigner, said "Our new investigation shows Sinar
Mas is selling paper products from rainforest and peatland destruction
to major brands all over the world."
The Greenpeace documents how Sinar Mas
is wreaking havoc in two important rainforest areas on the Indonesian
island of Sumatra: the Bukit Tigapuluh Forest Landscape and the
Kerumantan peat forest. Bukit Tigapuluh is one of the last refuges for
critically endangered Sumatran tigers and orangutans. Kerumutan's carbon
rich peatlands are a key defense against climate change; some Kerumutan
peat is deeper than three meters and illegal to clear under Indonesian
law. Despite this, APP uses the logs from these rainforest areas to feed
its Sumatran based pulp mills, which export pulp and paper products
worldwide.
"Kerumutan and Bukit Tigapuluh are just two of
many endangered forests being decimated by Sinar Mas for paper and palm
oil plantation expansion" said Skar. "Indonesian President Yudyohono's
new commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation
will be undermined unless he extends the moratorium on new deforestation
licenses to cover all forest and peatlands that are currently slated
for destruction by Sinar Mas and other companies," he concluded.
Several leading
companies have already responded to Greenpeace evidence of the Sinar
Mas group's destructive practices by cancelling their contracts with the
Indonesian palm oil and paper giant (3). Kraft has confirmed that is
phasing out APP paper and packaging, (4) whilst Kimberly- Clark, Nestle
and Unilever are implementing new policies that will also rule out
supplies from APP, unless the company and its suppliers make substantial
changes. Unilever, Kraft, and Nestle have also dropped contracts with
Golden Agri Resources (GAR), the Sinar Mas group's palm oil arm,
following recent Greenpeace campaigns. (5) In the financial world, HSBC
Global Asset Management announced it dropped all holdings in GAR.
"It's time for companies like Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts
and Kentucky Fried Chicken to catch up. We're calling on companies in
this report to stop doing business with Sinar Mas immediately. In
addition, we urge them to publicly support the immediate protection of
Indonesia's peatlands and back a moratorium on rainforest destruction,"
continued Skar.
The destruction of rainforests and
peatlands is the key reason why Indonesia accounts for around a quarter
of all greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation. (6) According
to recent government estimates, Indonesia ranks as the world's third
largest greenhouse gasemitter. (7)
Notes to Editor
NOTES TO EDITORS
(1) Greenpeace report "How Sinar Mas is
Pulping the Planet", July 2010 https://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/reports/SinarMas-APP
(2) APP has major facilities in Indonesia and China and is expanding in
Australia, Canada and the US. It has sales networks in the US, the UK
and Spain.
(3) Between November 2007 and April 2010, Greenpeace released a series
of reports documenting Sinar Mas' rainforest and peatland destruction
for palm oil including Illegal forest clearance and RSPO greenwash: Case
study of Sinar Mas at https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/forests/sinarmasRSPOgreenwash.pdf.
(4) Letter from Kraft Foods to Greenpeace UK, 1 July 2010.
(5) A number of major corporations including Staples, Office Depot and
Woolworths (Australia) have dropped paper contracts with Sinar Mas due
to its environmental bad practises.
(6) For full reference see 'How Sinar Mas is Pulping the Planet p.32
Endnote 6
(7) For full reference see 'How Sinar Mas is Pulping the Planet p.32
Endnote 7
Greenpeace is a global, independent campaigning organization that uses peaceful protest and creative communication to expose global environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.
+31 20 718 2000LATEST NEWS
At Least 95 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks Including Massacres at Beach Café, Aid Points
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," said one eyewitness to a strike on the popular al-Baqa Café.
Jun 30, 2025
Israeli forces ramped up their genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip Monday, killing at least 95 Palestinians in attacks including massacres at a seaside café and a humanitarian aid distribution center and bombings of five school shelters housing displaced families and a hospital where refugees were sheltering in tents.
An Israeli strike targeted the al-Baqa Café in western Gaza City, one of the few operating businesses remaining after 633 days of Israel's obliteration of the coastal strip and a popular gathering place for journalists, university students, artists, and others seeking reliable internet service and a respite from nearly 21 months of near-relentless attacks.
Medical sources said at least 33 civilians were killed and nearly 50 others wounded in the massacre, including footballer Mustafa Abu Amira, photojournalist Ismail Abu Hatab—who survived an earlier Israeli airstrike and is reportedly the 227th journalists killed by Israel since October 2023—and prominent artist Frans Al-Salmi, whose final painting depicting a young Palestinian woman killed by Israeli forces resembles photographs of its slain creator posted on social media after her killing.
Warning: Photos shows image of death
Survivor Ali Abu Ateila toldThe Associated Press that the café was crowded with women and children at the time of the attack.
"Without a warning, all of a sudden, a warplane hit the place, shaking it like an earthquake," he said.
Another survivor of the massacre told Britain's Sky News: "All I see is blood... Unbelievable. People come here to take a break from what they see inside Gaza. They come westward to breathe."
Eyewitness Ahmed Al-Nayrab toldAgence France-Presse that a "huge explosion shook the area."
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," he said. "It was a scene that made your skin crawl."
Witnesses and officials said Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking food and other humanitarian aid from a U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution point in southern Gaza, killing 15 people amid near-daily massacres of aid-seekers.
"We were targeted by artillery," survivor Monzer Hisham Ismail told The Associated Press. Another survivor, Yousef Mahmoud Mokheimar, told the AP that Israeli troops "fired at us indiscriminately." Mokheimar was shot in the leg, another man who tried to rescue him was also shot.
IDF troops have killed nearly 600 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded more than 4,000 others over the past month, with Israeli military officers and soldiers saying they were ordered to deliberately fire on civilians in search of food and other necessities amid Israel's weaponized starvation of Gaza.
Another 13 people were reportedly killed Monday when IDF warplanes bombed an aid warehouse in the Zeitoun quarter of southern Gaza City, according to al-Ahli Baptist Hospital officials cited by The Palestine Chronicle. IDF warplanes also reportedly bombed five schools housing displaced families, three of them in Zeitoun. Israeli forces also bombed the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinian families are sheltering in tents. It was reportedly the 12th time the hospital has been bombed since the start of the war.
The World Health Organization has documented more than 700 attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities since October 2023. Most of Gaza's hospitals are out of service due to Israeli attacks, some of which have been called genocidal by United Nations experts.
Israel's overall behavior in the war is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 204,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried under rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose casualty figures have been found to be generally accurate and even a likely undercount by peer-reviewed studies.
The intensified IDF attacks follow Israel's issuance of new forced evacuation orders amid the ongoing Operation Gideon's Chariots, an ongoing offensive which aims to conquer and indefinitely occupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse much of its population, possibly to make way for Jewish recolonization as advocated by many right-wing Israelis.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'We Cannot Be Silent': Tlaib Leads 19 US Lawmakers Demanding Israel Stop Starving Gaza
"This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help."
Jun 30, 2025
As the death toll from Israel's forced starvation of Palestinians continues to rise amid the ongoing U.S.-backed genocidal assault and siege of the Gaza Strip, Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Monday led 18 congressional colleagues in a letter demanding that the Trump administration push for an immediate cease-fire, an end to the Israeli blockade, and a resumption of humanitarian aid into the embattled coastal enclave.
"We are outraged at the weaponization of humanitarian aid and escalating use of starvation as a weapon of war by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people in Gaza," Tlaib (D-Mich.)—the only Palestinian American member of Congress—and the other lawmakers wrote in their letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "For over three months, Israeli authorities have blocked nearly all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, fueling mass starvation and suffering among over 2 million people. This follows over 600 days of bombardment, destruction, and forced displacement, and nearly two decades of siege."
"According to experts, 100% of the population is now at risk of famine, and nearly half a million civilians, most of them children, are facing 'catastrophic' conditions of 'starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels,'" the legislators noted. "These actions are a direct violation of both U.S. and international humanitarian law, with devastating human consequences."
Gaza officials have reported that hundreds of Palestinians—including at least 66 children—have died in Gaza from malnutrition and lack of medicine since Israel ratcheted up its siege in early March. Earlier this month, the United Nations Children's Fund warned that childhood malnutrition was "rising at an alarming rate," with 5,119 children under the age of 5 treated for the life-threatening condition in May alone. Of those treated children, 636 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, the most lethal form of the condition.
Meanwhile, nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,000 others have been injured as Israeli occupation forces carry out near-daily massacres of desperate people seeking food and other humanitarian aid at or near distribution sites run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Israel Defense Forces officers and troops have said that they were ordered to shoot and shell aid-seeking Gazans, even when they posed no threat.
"This is not aid," the lawmakers' letter argues. "UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini has warned that, under the GHF, 'aid distribution has become a death trap.' We cannot allow this to continue."
"We strongly oppose any efforts to dismantle the existing U.N.-led humanitarian coordination system in Gaza, which is ready to resume operations immediately once the blockade is lifted," the legislators wrote. "Replacing this system with the GHF further restricts lifesaving aid and undermines the work of long-standing, trusted humanitarian organizations. The result of this policy will be continued starvation and famine."
"We cannot be silent. This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help," the lawmakers added. "We demand an immediate end to the blockade, an immediate resumption of unfettered humanitarian aid entry into Gaza, the restoration of U.S. funding to UNRWA, and an immediate and lasting cease-fire. Any other path forward is a path toward greater hunger, famine, and death."
Since launching the retaliatory annihilation of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed at least 56,531 Palestinians and wounded more than 133,600 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which also says over 14,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Upward of 2 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, often more than once.
On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated a call for a cease-fire deal that would secure the release of the remaining 22 living Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas.
In addition to Tlaib, the letter to Rubio was signed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), Al Green (Texas), Jonathan Jackson (Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Henry "Hank"Johnson (Ga.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Jim McGovern (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Chellie Pingree (Maine), Mark Pocan (Wisc.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Paul Tonko (N.Y.), Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (N.J.).
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden National Security Adviser Among Those Crafting 'Project 2029' Policy Agenda for Democrats
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade," said one observer. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
Jun 30, 2025
Amid the latest battle over the direction the Democratic Party should move in, a number of strategists and political advisers from across the center-left's ideological spectrum are assembling a committee to determine the policy agenda they hope will be taken up by a Democratic successor to President Donald Trump.
Some of the names on the list of people crafting the agenda—named Project 2029, an echo of the far-right Project 2025 blueprint Trump is currently enacting—left progressives with deepened concerns that party insiders have "learnt nothing" and "forgotten nothing" from the president's electoral victories against centrist Democratic candidates over the past decade, as one economist said.
The project is being assembled by former Democratic speechwriter Andrei Cherny, now co-founder of the policy journal Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and includes Jake Sullivan, a former national security adviser under the Biden administration; Jim Kessler, founder of the centrist think tank Third Way; and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Progressives on the advisory board for the project include economist Justin Wolfers and former Roosevelt Institute president Felicia Wong, but antitrust expert Hal Singer said any policy agenda aimed at securing a Democratic victory in the 2028 election "needs way more progressives."
As The New York Times noted in its reporting on Project 2029, the panel is being convened amid extensive infighting regarding how the Democratic Party can win back control of the White House and Congress.
After democratic socialist and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's (D-36) surprise win against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week in New York City's mayoral primary election—following a campaign with a clear-eyed focus on making childcare, rent, public transit, and groceries more affordable—New York City has emerged as a battleground in the fight. Influential Democrats including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have so far refused to endorse him and attacked him for his unequivocal support for Palestinian rights.
Progressives have called on party leaders to back Mamdani, pointing to his popularity with young voters, and accept that his clear message about making life more affordable for working families resonated with Democratic constituents.
But speaking to the Times, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake exemplified how many of the party's strategists have insisted that candidates only need to package their messages to voters differently—not change the messages to match the political priorities of Mamdani and other popular progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"We didn't lack policies," Lake told the Times of recent national elections. "But we lacked a functioning narrative to communicate those policies."
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have drawn crowds of thousands in red districts this year at Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy rallies—another sign, progressives say, that voters are responding to politicians who focus on billionaires' outsized control over the U.S. political system and on economic justice.
Project 2029's inclusion of strategists like Kessler, who declared economic populism "a dead end for Democrats" in 2013, demonstrates "the whole problem [with Democratic leadership] in a nutshell," said Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Mass—as does Sullivan's seat on the advisory board.
As national security adviser to President Joe Biden, Sullivan played a key role in the administration's defense and funding of Israel's assault on Gaza, which international experts and human rights groups have said is a genocide.
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade: Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Israel/Gaza War, and the 2024 Joe Biden campaign," said Nick Field of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
"Jake Sullivan is shaping domestic policy for the next Democratic administration," he added. "Who is happy with the Biden foreign policy legacy?"
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular