• A rule allowing subsistence farmers to burn small plots of land has been reinserted into the Job Creation Act passed last week.
• Other provisions affecting the plantation industry have also been adjusted in a new version of the law that appeared this week.

Multiple versions of a sweeping deregulation law passed in Indonesia last week contain substantial differences affecting the nation’s plantation sector, despite assurances from lawmakers that any changes to the text made in recent days were merely cosmetic in nature.

Main photo: The family of Chai Bunthonglek, a farmer who was killed in 2015 in a community farm in Klong Sai Pattana in Surat Thani province in southern Thailand, Aug 24, 2020. (Photo: Thomson Reuters Foundation/Rina Chandran)

SURAT THANI: Somruedee Bunthonglek has not repaired the bullet holes in the pickup truck her husband was driving when he survived an assassination attempt barely a year after her father was shot dead on the same communal farm in southern Thailand.

• Sierra Leone is among the poorest countries in the world. In the 1990s, when other African countries were privatizing key industries in order to attract foreign investment and become eligible for international loans, a civil war was raging in Sierra Leone that prevented the country from taking part in the controversial structural adjustment programs initiated by the World Bank and the Inter-national Monetary Fund.

• Mbonjo sits in the heart of Cameroon’s country’s largest oil palm and rubber-producing region. In 2000, state-owned oil palm plantations around the village were acquired by Société Financière des Caoutchoucs (Socfin), a Belgian holding company that operates palm oil and rubber plantations through dozens of subsidiaries across Africa and Southeast Asia.

• A court in Indonesia has sentenced two indigenous farmers to eight and 10 months in prison respectively for harvesting palm fruit from land whose ownership is contested by the community and a palm oil firm, PT Hamparan Masawit Bangun Persada.
• The ruling appeared to ignore evidence showing that the villagers are the rightful owners of the land; the defendants say they will appeal and also file a lawsuit against the company.

Communities in biodiverse Tanintharyi Region are spurning big, top-down projects and seeking recognition for their own approach to conservation.

From its forested borderlands in the east, to vast mangrove forests and hundreds of island ecosystems in the Andaman Sea to the west, Tanintharyi Region is a bastion of nature and biodiversity. The region is home to one of the largest remaining expanses of intact low-elevation evergreen forest in Southeast Asia, a stronghold for endangered and endemic species including tigers, tapirs and pangolins.

JAKARTA — Two people have died in a series of land disputes between major companies and rural communities in Indonesia.

Activists have denounced the escalation in the conflicts, saying businesses shouldn’t be taking advantage of the country’s focus on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic to further their own — often illegal — interests.

Open Letter to Socfin, 29th April 2020: 

We demand justice and safety for workers on Socfin’s rubber/oil palm plantations  during the Covid-19 pandemic

Dear board members and shareholders,
 

We, the undersigned, are writing you in regards to the conditions of workers on the Socfin plantations as well as the conditions of neighboring communities, in particular during the current Covid-19 pandemic. 
 

PETALING JAYA: Sime Darby Plantation Investment (Liberia) Pte Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sime Darby Plantation Bhd (SDP), has fully disposed of Sime Darby Plantation (Liberia) Inc.

The disposal of 100% equity interest to Mano Palm Oil Industries Ltd was completed on Wednesday for a cash consideration of US$1, plus an earn-out payment to be determined by the average future crude palm oil (CPO) price and future CPO production of SDP Liberia in 2022.

The earn-out consideration will be payable quarterly over a period of eight years, commencing from April 2023.

The following story is developed from remarks at TEDxJakarta 2019.

• Individuals from Indonesia and Liberia embroiled in land disputes with oil palm plantations have visited the Netherlands to call on the Dutch banks facilitating these companies’ operations to take action.
• The companies in question are PT Astra Agro Lestari in Indonesia and Golden Veroleum Liberia, both of which are owned by conglomerates based in secrecy jurisdictions and which have financial links to Dutch banks ABN AMRO and Rabobank.
• The banks say their relationship with the companies is only indirect, and as such they say there is little they

 Palm oil plantations in Indonesia and commercial fruit orchards in the Philippines have uprooted indigenous people and rural communities from their land, despite laws put in place to protect them, human rights groups said.

Powerful businesses, corrupt officials and paramilitary groups are fuelling violence against rural communities in the Philippines, Britain-based Global Witness said on Tuesday.