On Tuesday (25/09) some environmentalists from Greenpeace abseiled down storage tanks, and they also managed to set banners at an Indonesia-based palm-oil refinery to stage of protest over deforestation in Indonesia’s tropical forests.
The banners said that the world’s largest palm oil trader Singapore’s Wilmar International is sourcing “dirty palm oil”, Reuters has reported.
The anger has reached its peak since Wilmar kept breaking its promises to stop clearing natural forests for the sake of plantations. In 2013, Wilmar actually had pledged to run its business without destructing forests. Two years later in 2016, Wilmar created Policy Progress Report 2015 that showed a two-year compilation of its progress to fulfil its promise of ‘no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation’ they made back in 2013.
Based on the statement by a spokesman of PT Multi Nabati Sulawesi, the refinery operator, this incident did not affect the operations at the facility in northern Sulawesi, Indonesia. “They are there illegally, so we plan to report them to the police,” she told Reuters.
Kiki Taufik, head of the Greenpeace forests campaign in Indonesia admitted that the total of 30 activists would occupy the whole facility until 6 pm Singapore Time.
This kind of demonstration is actually uncommon in Southeast Asian countries as mostly they would come in forms of marches or rallies.
“We need to do this without a permit, but we take the risk because we believe this action will make the companies and the public hear us,” according to Taufik when reached by phone.
The recent action taken by the President through a moratorium issuance on new permits for palm plantations for three years undeniably brings challenges with it since Indonesia is the greatest palm oil in the world where the utilization of such oil is applicable from chocolate to shampoo.
In response to this, it seems that environmentalists ambitiously want to put an end to deforestation so that they tried to increase the pressure on companies and governments in Indonesia and Malaysia to halt the operations that are related to palm oil.
“If we don’t hold companies accountable, the environment will continue to face a threat from industry,” Taufik added.