Greenpeace volunteers constructing a dam to prevent valuable peatlands being drained © Greenpeace/Oka Budhi
Belinda, senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace UK, is in Indonesia at the Forest Defenders Camp, to witness first-hand the destruction of the forests and peatlands by the palm oil industry.
Indonesia is a mass of contradictions. Two days ago, I stood on a high plateau in the middle of a national park. In front of me stretched miles of virgin rainforest, stunning and luscious, the mist rising up from the canopy. The sounds of insects filled the air, aquamarine birds skimmed overhead and in the distance, the occasional cracking of a branch as monkeys swung through the trees.
Yet today, only a few hours' drive away, I stand in a barren, burnt, and devastated land. What was once part of the same stretch of tropical forest I'd visited earlier is now barely identifiable except for the occasional blackened tree stump. And the eeriest thing is the total silence - no bird calls, no insects buzzing, no chattering monkeys. It's a land drained and devoid of all life.
Vast swathes of Indonesia's rainforest have already suffered the same fate. The country is already in the Guinness Book of Records for the fastest rate of forest destruction on the planet and this continues apace, not just to meet a global demand for timber and paper but also to feed our insatiable demand for palm oil. It's a product most of us are barely even aware of yet it's in thousands of supermarket products. As we revealed last week, it makes its way into the likes of KitKats, Pringles and Flora.
Here, oil palms are grown everywhere. I'm with a UK TV news crew to witness and document what's happening for
ourselves, and, as we travel through Riau province in Sumatra,
we can't miss them. Twenty-year-old plantations vie alongside new ones while the
forest is torn down to make way for even more. Local farmers, seeing the money
to be made in this in-demand commodity, stack their palm fruit at the roadside,
while major corporations cultivate their own crops beyond our sightline.
Either way, the result is the same. The roads carry trucks full of palm fruit to local refineries, which belch black smoke into the sky. The processed oil is then taken to ports like Dumai on the east coast of the island where it's exported to the international market.
One of the main reasons for our expedition is to visit the Forest Defenders Camp near Kuala Cenaku, which Greenpeace established a month ago. Working with the local community, the camp is situated on the edge of an area which was once forest but is now blackened and burnt, and a major Indonesian palm oil company, Duta Palma, is in the process of converting it into a plantation. Taking action to protect this vulnerable area, volunteers from the camp and members of the community are together constructing a series of dams to block the canals dug to drain the peatland underneath.
The dams are incredible structures: built with the blood, sweat and tears of our intrepid volunteers, who are now on canal number four - the biggest so far - stretching 10 meters by two meters. By blocking these dams, the team hopes to help protect this peatland, an enormous carbon store, the destruction of which is already causing massive carbon emissions. And the work is hard. I spent yesterday working with them in the field, spending from 6am to 6pm moving sandbags and shaping timber in 36 degree heat.
Even in this small area, the impacts of the palm plantations are devastating. Amazing animal and plant species are forced back into ever smaller tracts of land as the company clears and burns the forest. Just today, one of the Greenpeace crew spied a sun bear at the side of the converted area, desperately searching for food before heading back into the remaining forest area.
In addition, local communities are fighting for the rights to their ancestral land against the might of the palm oil producers. And that's not the only issue. The herbicide used on the young oil palms is seeping into the river and, in turn, into their food.
At the end of the day, it's back to camp for rice and vegetables, lots of water and unfortunately hundreds of mosquitoes. But the vibe here is incredible and the energy inspiring. I feel so privileged to be a part of it and of this fight. As ever, I feel an overwhelming sense of pride to work for Greenpeace, and deep admiration for the courageous people I work with.
