Recently word came to our Greenpeace office in Indonesia that a Sumatran tiger was stuck in an animal trap on the border of an Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) concession. It was trapped for six days in total without food or water. After a week of suffering forest officers arrived to evacuate the tiger – but it was too late. The tiger died during the rescue attempt.
Warning: this blog contains images and video footage that may upset you.
Zamzami, a Greenpeace media campaigner, traveled to the area with the
rescue team as an observer, and was present for the tiger’s last few
hours. He describes the scene that met him: despite its ordeal the
“tiger still emitted a strong wild aura” and “greeted me with an angry
roar”. Everyone present stood stunned and silent to see the “King of the Jungle lying low, trapped and suffering in his own home”.
The
spot where the tiger became trapped was on the border of PT Arara Abadi,
an APP acacia plantation in the province of Riau. Video footage reveals
that nearby the spot where the tiger wandered into the trap, and later
died, there was a large area of recently destroyed forest where active
clearing was ongoing.
That means a lot of disruptive activity was happening: trees were being felled and heavy machinery, like excavators, were busy clearing the rainforest. Only 13 kilometres away from where the excavators were at work is the spot where this animal spent its last days trapped, injured and starving.
Unfortunately, more tragic moments like this are the future that
is in store for this majestic animal. The Sumatran tiger is already
endangered, there are only around 400 remaining in the wild and - now we
know – even one less than that.
Yet APP operations in Indonesia
continue to clear rainforest that includes tiger habitat, destroying
the home and hunting grounds of the Sumatran tiger in order to feed
APP’s pulp and paper operations. From there what was once rainforest
ends up in all sorts of things - like throw-away toy packaging.
Some of this packaging has been used by toy companies such as Hasbro, Disney and Mattel. And the future doesn’t look any better. APP has ambitious expansion plans and the areas of rainforest it plans to expand into includes more tiger habitat.
Someone once told me that roads in a forest are like veins – once opened they can end up draining the forest of life. When APP builds a concession in tiger habitat, it not only destroys the forest the tiger would normally roam, sleep and hunt in – the roads it builds to carry away the timber also let in all kinds of other disruptions.
People come and lay traps to hunt other animals, and even if they don’t mean to interfere with the tiger, they do. When their traditional habitat is destroyed tigers must roam even further for food and shelter, which often brings them closer to forest communities and causes more conflict.
The evidence is expected to pile more pressure on the world’s largest forestry certification body, the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification. The PEFC certifies ‘sustainable’ paper products around the world, but has been criticised for their connections to APP.
Amazingly – the plantation where the tiger was found has already been verified by PEFC certifiers as ‘non-controversial’ so that its timber can be used in PEFC stamped products.
The truth is that the plantation where the tiger was found was previously rainforest and that rainforest clearance has continued in this same concession area. Verifying APP areas like this as non controversial makes a mockery of the PEFC scheme.
APP must stop relying on further clearance of rainforest for its
business. Destruction of rainforests in Indonesia must stop to protect
animals like the Sumatran tiger, minimize the negative consequences for
forest communities, and for Indonesia to be able to cut its carbon
emissions contributing to climate change, most of which come from
deforestation.
This pulp and paper company adds insult to injury
by portraying itself as a sustainable, responsible business – which
acts to protect biodiversity and animals like the Sumatran tiger. It
runs ads on television and in print all over the world presenting itself
almost as if it's an NGO, rather than a pulp and paper business. These
ads often use the tagline ‘APP Cares’ next to an image like the imprint
of a tiger paw, giving the impression that APP cares about tigers. In
reality its operations destroy tiger habitat for profit - pushing these
animals to the brink of extinction.
The image that APP projects of being a caring company, committed to sustainability and conservation efforts, is revealed as a lie as soon as it is compared with images of the reality of APP operations on the ground.
In addition to removing APP products from their supply chain, toy companies like Mattel, Hasbro and Disney must put in place new policies to cover all their purchases of pulp and paper products. This is the only way to ensure they will not be complicit in forest destruction in the future.
The last moments of this one Sumatran tiger are just the latest example of the terrible costs of the ongoing destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests – if APP continues to operate this way, there will be more.
- We are demanding Mattel, Hasbro and Disney remove deforestation from their supply chains – that means removing APP products and creating new policies covering all their purchasing of pulp and paper products.
Find out more about APP and how Mattel is wrapped in rainforest destruction:
