I really love Orangutans (Orangutan literally means "person of the forest"), one of my favourite animals. They are really cute. However, the population of this species of apes plummets 90% in the past five years due to deforestation done by local authorities. The Jakarta Post reports that the population of Sumatran orangutans in the wild is only about 6.500, because their numbers are decreasing year by year due to deforestation for palm oil plantations, hunting and trafficking.This video below actually belongs to Dove, one of the beauty products produced by Unilever. But it can show you the description what is happening in Indonesian forests and Orangutan population, today.
When I spent my mid-year holiday in Jakarta, I joined Rotaract club and attended one presentation speakered by one of activist of Greenpeace Indonesia. He presented the fact that Indonesian forests represent 10% of the world’s remaining tropical rainforests and cover about 260 million acres (Orangutan Foundation International). This is sad because one day i will lose my cute orangutans because people keep doing massive illegal logging and clearing for palm oil plantations.
In terms of CSR, one of a big company in Indonesia, Sinar Mas, has been accussed for violation towards forests and cli
mate crime. To expand the business and supply raw materials, the company keeps doing illegal logging for massive expansion as they hold unplanted concession areas totalling another 200,000 hectares of Indonesian rainforest and have plans to acquire a further 1.1 million hectares, mainly in Papua. Greenpeace Indonesia, as the pressure group dealing with environmental issue, calls for an immediate halt to all expansion into forests and peatland by Sinar Mas and other companies. Further, they are calling on the Indonesian government to immediately implement a moratorium on any further forest conversion (Greenpeace). Greenpeace Indonesia also prevented the loading of crude palm oil on the Isola Corallo, a Rotterdam-bound tanker in Dumai, Indonesia's main palm oil export port. A Greenpeace activist was locked onto the anchor chain of the Isola Corallo for over 36 hours to stop it from moving.Unfortunately, I can't find any footage that really portrays Sinar Mas and its illegal logging execution. But i think, this video below might help.
I would say that Sinar Mas faces a two-edge sword. One edge, the company needs to address this environmental issue to avoid conflict that is potential to decrease the company reputation, because Greenpeace Indonesia (even Greenpeace International) has pointed its finger to Sinar Mas as a forest criminal. On the other hand, Sinar Mas is the main supplier of internationally-known company, such as Nestle, Unilever, Pizza Hut and Burger King. Do you think they should form strategic alliance in trying to minimise the impact of forest deforestation and the extinction of Orangutans population? What would you do?
I definitely think that Sinas Mas should strategically partner with a NGO to try to decrease harm. This will do both improve their reputation AND save the environment, and if they continue this deforestation there will be nothing left!
ReplyDeleteI'm an animal lover as well and seeing vidoes destroying their habitat always makes me so sad.
The work Greenpeace does is amazing. In Canada they worked so hard to ban the seal hunt, which involved risking their lives to capture footage of the horrible murder these animals experience.