The main global organization for certifying sustainable wood says one of its members destroyed tropical forests in easternmost Indonesia but it stopped short of expelling the company.
The Bonn, Germany-based Forest Stewardship Council said it would impose "improvement" requirements on Korindo, a Korean-Indonesian conglomerate, that an environmental group found had cleared more than 30,000 hectares of tropical forests for palm oil plantations in Indonesia's Papua and Maluku regions.
The council's two-year investigation was triggered by a complaint from the
Indonesia has one of the world's highest rates of natural forest destruction due to logging by the pulp and paper and palm oil industries and their subsequent conversion of the land to industrial plantations. Loss of natural rainforest habitat in Sumatra and
The council said in a statement Tuesday that its investigation "concluded that Korindo had converted forests to establish oil palm plantations in Indonesia, leading to the destruction of high conservation values."
It defended its actions as not illegal under Indonesian law but said it would "take necessary actions in order to mitigate any past negative impacts."
Mighty Earth's senior campaigns director Deborah Lapidus said Korindo had for years used "FSC's prestigious eco-forestry label to greenwash its destructive practices."
The environmental group welcomed the certification organization's announcement but also criticized it for not releasing the full findings of its investigations, which would allow Korindo to "distort the facts and spin the conclusions."