Blog: Forests

I was hoping to write my first post in Indonesia from the Rainbow Warrior. As it turns out, the Warrior is anchored out at sea, waiting for permission to get into the country from the Indonesian government. The ship and crew have been there for several days now, occasionally communicating with Indonesian supporters by virtual hookup (at this event for disappointed supporters) instead of in the steel flesh everyone was hoping see.

On the other hand I am very much here, in the middle of Jakarta, on the most densely populated island on Earth (Java). What can I tell you about Jakarta? It smells of cloves. The congested traffic crawls. The people are interesting, enthusiastic, gracious. It's humid - really humid. Every day, a downpour or two washes away the smog and cools the city down; you can almost hear the pavements sizzle.

Now the arrival in the UK of Aida Greenbury, the Director of Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement for the notorious Asia Pulp and Paper, is always going to get Greenpeace excited - it’s not often she has to defend her company's actions live and online. But our excitement turned a little sour when APP refused our request to debate Aida directly on Print Week's webcast. Perhaps APP's new PR agency Cohn and Wolfe is advising Aida against talking to us in public.

It seems that Sinar Mas hasn’t learnt from last month’s mistakes and is labouring on with a strategy of hiring auditors to distract attention from their ongoing involvement in forest and peatland destruction.

This week Sinar Mas's pulp and paper arm – Asia Pulp and Paper - released a new 'independent audit' that purports to prove that Greenpeace investigations are wrong and our evidence of forest destruction unfounded. The people behind the audit are, shall we say, a little less independent than they claim. Alan Oxley and his consultancy International Trade Strategies Global (ITS) are an Australian outfit who have a track record of working for companies engaged in unsustainable business practices - including logging companies.

In these next two episodes, actress Marion Cottilard continues her journey through the Congo rainforest. Here, she sees first hand the wreckage left behind by the logging companies working in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As we've heard many times before, the companies get permission to log from the local villages by promising to build schools and clinics, but these often never materialise and if they do, they're hopelessly inadequate. Or logging rights are sold for salt, beer and soap when the timber fetches thousands of dollars.