The Indigenous Dayak villagers of Landak, Indonesia, on the island of Borneo, are the most recent victims of expansion plans of Wilmar, the largest palm oil company in the world. Sudarmo, a rubber tapper in Landak, faced a horrible surprise when he went to work on his rubber plantation one morning in July 2007. Upon arriving, he found that almost 200 of his rubber trees had been bulldozed.1 Workers from a Wilmar subsidiary had come during the night and cleared Sudarmo’s land to make room for a palm oil plantation.2 The company claimed that local government officials had given it legal title to the land. According to Friends of the Earth Indonesia (WALHI), 78,000 square miles of rainforest across Indonesia have been burned and cleared for palm oil production.
In Indonesia, there is no formal recognition of traditional land rights. To acquire formal ownership, land-dependent community members who have lived on and worked their land for generations must go through a grueling and expensive bureaucratic process which often proves futile. Most communities don’t even know that formal land permits exist until a company like Wilmar arrives with bulldozers to claim the land.
Sudarmo’s community, like other Dayak communities indigenous to Borneo, depends on healthy forests and clean rivers to survive. But companies like Wilmar (which is controlled by Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland) are putting their survival at risk. After Sudarmo’s rubber trees were cut down, the community filed a complaint with local government officials. Shortly thereafter, representatives from the Wilmar subsidiary threatened to report the villagers as illegal loggers if they refused to hand over their land. The company also threatened to refuse employment to any villagers who resisted and to abandon a promised road-building project.
ADM, in association with Wilmar and its subsidiaries, is violating Indonesian law, which requires that companies consult with communities before they make use of their traditional lands, even when the government has granted the companies legal permits. The government also requires an Environmental Impact Assessment before palm oil development begins—a requirement which was never fulfilled. In other regions of Borneo, Indonesian authorities are suing Wilmar for intentional and systematic illegal burning of forests to clear land for plantations.
Wilmar and ADM are also violating their own Corporate Social Responsibility policies and criteria set within the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Complaints have been filed to the RSPO and to the International Finance Corporations—the private arm of the World Bank—in an attempt to hold these corporations accountable. Meanwhile, Dayak communities in Landak continue to suffer.
