" Vital Expansion of Sumatra's Bukit Tigapuluh National Park Has Been Scrapped in order to Make Way for Acacia Plantations."

According to a recent article at the website "EYES ON THE FOREST" a planned 100,000 expansion of the enormously important Bukit Tigapuluh National Park in southern Sumatra has been pre-empted by the infamous Asia Pulp and Paper Corporation in order to make room for acacia plantations. Two-thirds of Bukit Tigapuluh's total area has already been subjected to timber piracy in recent years and the expansion of the park was heralded as a savior for many threatened Sumatran species among them the endangered selo palm tree, the rafflesia haselti, the koompassia excelsa tree, the gravely imperiled Sumatran tiger, the Malayan tapir,the false ghavial, several species of hornbills, among many others.
Bukit Tigapuluh holds the largest remaining areas of primary lowland rain forest on the island of Sumatra and without the expansion the park's current area of in tact primary forest may be too small to save many species dependent upon remaining Sumatran lowland forest.

If possible, this would make a legitimate Action Alert as Asia Pulp and Paper has an already-tarnished reputation. Its interception of conservation plans for the Bukit Tigapuluh National Park merit a legal battle. Sumatra's lowland rain frest is nearly gone, partly due to the abusive practices of this sorry excuse for a corporation.

Below is a very critical press release by international NGOs about the Dutch proposal:

27 April 2007,Paraguay / Argentina / The Netherlands

International NGOs: Dutch report on Biomass Sustainability Criteria lacks vision from the South

Today, the final report of the Dutch initiative to develop criteria for `Sustainable
Biomass' is presented by its authors to the Dutch government. Because the EU
plans to strongly promote the use of biofuels - now more often called 'agrofuels' -
the (un)sustainability of the large scale production of agrofuel crops is at the
centre of international attention.

The undersigned organisations express their disappointment that the committee responsible (the Cramer committee) has not consulted with civil
society organisations in the South, where most biomass (for example for
agrofuels), will be produced. The perspectives of smallholders, local communities and indigenous peoples, often suffering the consequences of monoculture expansion, have not been heard. As past experiences with developing certification
schemes have shown, local stakeholder participation, especially in the criteria
setting process, is crucial. Not only for its credibility, but also for a sound analysis of the social and environmental problems related to monoculture production.

Apart from that, the amounts of land used up by the monoculture plantations, and
the economical interestes linked to them, lead us to believe the implementation of any sustainability criteria to be very difficult. In the case of soy, a previous criteria-
setting initiative - the Round Table on Responsible Soy - has been rejected by many civil society organisations representing local stakeholders.

Another mayor failure of the report is that it does not even reject the `book and claim´ certification system, in which certificates can be freely traded, although it is
clearly stated in the report itself that this system is likely to lead to fraudulent practices. This demonstrates that the Commission pays very little attention to the
many problems associated with implementing the proposed certification systems in practice.

"All three certification systems suggested are unable to address the indirect impacts of agrofuel production", says Simone Lovera of the Global Forest Coalition, an international coalition of NGOs and Indigenous Peoples'Organizations. "Thefact that agrofuel itself is not produced on recently deforested land does not mean that it
does not cause deforestation, as the fact that large tracks of existing agricultural
land are taken over for agrofuel production will lead to other forms of agriculture and
cattle ranching to move to
recently deforested areas."

Importantly, the Cramer report does acknowledges the fact that certification in itself
cannot solve these indirect effects. The report states that if the negative impacts at
macro-level appear to be too big, it is the responsibility of the Dutch government to
take action and exert influence on producer countries. "Should the producer country
not be responsive, then The Netherlands faces a political consideration, whether or not in EU context, to discourage the use of biomass from that country", says the
report.

The undersigned organisations would advice the Dutch Environment Minister, former chair of the Cramer committee, first of all to undertake a broad sustainability
impact assessment of the current production and consumption of commodity
products like palmoil, soy and sugar cane, and the likely effects of creating an additional market for them for agrofuels.

However, action on the side of consumer countries is what is most needed. In the context of EU promotion of agrofuel use, an Open Letter by Latin American organisations published in January states that "the problem of climate change
generated by the countries of the North cannot be solved by creating new problems in our region." Similarly, a broadly signed statement "Biofuels - A Disaster in the
Making", presented at the climate negotiations in Nairobi last November, calls Northern countries to reduce their energy consumption to sustainable levels - instead of pushing large scale agrofuel imports.

We therefore urge the Minister to firmly oppose the EU proposal for a 10%
binding target for agrofuels (biofuels) in transport and suspend all subsidies and other incentives for agro- energy from monoculture plantations.

Signed by:
Global Forest Coalition
World Rainforest Movement
Latin American Network against Monoculture Tree Plantations
Grupo de Reflexión Rural, Argentina
CEPPAS, Argentina
Corporate Europe Observatory

He Glen,

Holland is part of Europe.
Indonesia and the moneylender China are cutting the rainforest in Indonesia , plant oil palm trees, in order to get hard cash from Europe.
But Europese cars have the most economic motors, yes.'Cause the europeans see the necessity of lowering CO2 emission.
greetings,

Marcel Sommer

Today Greenpeace, WWF, FoE, RSPB and Enoughsenough are running a full page advert in several UK national newspapers over responding to the government's RTFO consultation.

The headline is "Tell the government to choose the right biofuel or the orang-utan gets it" (picture shows a petrol pump pointed at an oran-utan's head). They advise in the advertisement calling for compulsory sustainability standards for biofuels, and to say no to 'deforestation diesel' and yes to real 'green fuels'. The webpage with link to a copy of advert is at: www.greenpeace.org.uk/biofuels

The campaign is unclear on the issue of which biofuels are green, which could reflect some debate among them as to how to define this. I'm going to email them all and ask:

(i) Please oppose targets for biofuels and biomass, since they force a certain amount of land for this use regardless of how high food prices are at any one time, which means the targets one way or another force malnutrition of the poor and deforestation etc at such times;

(ii) Please oppose the 5% UK biofuel targets already announced, and proposals to increase them;

(iii) Please do not promote signals to government that biofuels will be green if they have sustainability monitoring. The FAO, Canadian Government and palm oil industry all already note that an increase in rapeseed oil use for biodiesel in the EU is indirectly causing increased EU palm oil imports.

There is no established mechanism to disconnect an increase in demand from increased uptake of land at the expense of carbon stores, biodiversity, food production or small farmer livelihoods.

(iv) Please oppose the current EU policy favouring liquid biofuels over solid biomass, even though the latter often produces much higher emissions savings from the same land.

(v) Please do not compromise on the above for the sake of the largest possible NGO coalition. Merely calling for mandatory sustainability certification as you are doing will do almost nothing to avert the problems you are rightly highlighting.

The contact email addresses or screens are: info@uk.greenpeace.org , whenisenoughsenough@hotmail.co.uk , www.wwf.org.uk/sitehelp/feedback.asp , www.foe.co.uk/feedbackcomment.html , www.rspb.org.uk/contactus/

The RTFO consultation must be replied to by May 17. Biofuelwatch's page on this is at http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/alerts.php#rtfo .

Jim

Dear Glen,

not a newspaper article or a report for the site, but I thought you'd be very interested to hear that the IPCC apparently now say that global carbon emissions from peat degradation exceed those from deforestation: http://www.wetlands.org/news.aspx?id=a7cf1f40-2c52-4727-81ed-2ac36dd3ba26 (with South-east Asia being the biggest single source of peat emissions).

Best wishes,

Almuth