A palm oil plantation owned by PT Agrinusa Persada Mulia – part of the part of the company formerly known as Gama – is planning to restore forest in Indonesia as part of a remediation plan, Eco Business reported on 15 June.
KPN Plantation, known as Gama Plantation until 2019, said it would remediate 38,000ha of forest in Papua and West Kalimantan, provinces that had undergone mass deforestation between 2013 and 2018, according to the report.
KPN’s chief operating officer, Hendri Saksti, was quoted as saying that the company’s plan “reaffirmed our responsibility and commitment to remedy past mistakes”.
In KPN’s recovery plan, the company had committed to restore three times the area of forest it believed it was liable for clearing, Eco Business wrote.
“We need to hedge our risk that not all [restoration] intervention sites will be successful in the long term,” Saksti said.
The restoration areas were in Kubu Raya in West Kalimantan and Merauke in West Papua, according to the report, and remediation efforts would include peatland rewetting, reforestation, conservation and social forestry.
In 2018, an investigation by Greenpeace had revealed that the Gama company, a group of plantation firms with common ownership, had cleared 21,500ha of rainforest in Papua and West Kalimantan during the previous five years, Eco Business wrote.
A Greenpeace campaign targeted at Singapore-listed palm oil trader Wilmar International, which had been using Gama as a supplier in violation of its no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation (NDPE) policy, set in 2013. Greenpeace also exposed family ties between Wilmar and Gama, according to the report.
Following the campaign, Wilmar cut off Gama from its supply chain in June 2018, along with a number of other suppliers, Eco Business said.
The following month, Gama declared a group-wide moratorium on new land development and, in September, introduced a NDPE policy, according to the report.
After consulting with Wilmar and environmental group Aidenvironment, Gama consolidated the 63 companies that operated on 200,000ha of plantation area into a single group, Eco Business reported, with Wilmar re-instating Gama as a supplier in 2019.
