Govt Issues New Permits For Oil Palm Plantation Development

Kuta (Antara Bali) - The Indonesian government has issued new permits for the development of oil palm plantations on around 28 million hectares of land across the country, Sawit Watch says.

"The areas as vast as that spread across the country," the non-governmental organization's head of the department of mitigation threat initiatives, Norman Jiwan, said after a conference on human rights and business here on Thursday.

He said the new permits must be reviewed by the authorities for immediate revocation if found inappropriate.

This has to be done in connection with the moratorium on issuance of new permits and the improvement of primary forest and peat land management put in the Presidential Instruction (Inpres) Number 10 of 2011.

"Do not allow the land as vast as that to become like 16 million hectare others in the forest regions that have been taken using land use permits but are not developed," he said.

Norman said until now according to Sawit Watch there are 11.5 million hectares of oil palm plantations in 23 provinces in the country.

"They are controlled by around 2,000 companies belonging to 30 big businessmen from Malaysia and Singapore," he said.

Norman said the palm oil production capacity in the country now reaches 22 million tons. Using the land used for it now capacity could still be optimized so that extension was not needed, he said.

"Therefore we think the issuance of new permits must be canceled to avoid large-scale extension," he said.

He said extension could create disputes between community members and palm oil companies.(*)