Greenpeace Canada and Indonesia’s Auriga Nusantara have submitted a complaint to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) calling it to acknowledge that Canadian forestry giant Paper Excellence and Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) are “two sides of the same coin.”
FSC formally disassociated with APP in October 2007 citing “substantial, publicly available information that APP was involved in destructive forestry practices.”
Despite this fact Paper Excellence continues to market its products using the FSC certification. Meanwhile the company dramatically expanded its business in North America and other regions. The company denies corporate links with APP but investigations by International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) partners and others have cast doubt on the claim.
The complaint calls FSC to publicly recognize the two companies’ connection and to disassociate from Paper Excellence and its affiliates, excluding them from FSC certification. At present, 42 Paper Excellence-owned pulp, paper, and saw mills operate with FSC certifications in Canada, the United States and France.
APP, whose suppliers are embroiled in conflicts with a hundred of villages in Indonesia, is meanwhile being accused of causing lethal forest fires in the past weeks in Indonesia. Its suppliers’ pulpwood plantations, developed on drained peatlands, are basically vast areas of fuel ready to burn and virtually impossible to extinguish or even to contain. Even without fires, these plantations emit almost 44 million tonnes of CO2 due to peat oxidation (as much as Norway’s total emissions). When fire occurs in dry seasons, they affect tens of thousand hectares only inside APP linked concessions, causing a persistent and thick layer of life-threatening haze that, in the past, led to diplomatic tensions with neighbouring countries, as well as causing thousands of cases of foetal infant and child mortality.
“Canadians, who like us Indonesians are already dealing with uncontrollable forest fires and dangerous air quality, deserve to know that Paper Excellence’s sister company APP has one of the worst corporate track records in Indonesia not only in deforestation but for forest fires as well,” said Auriga Nusantara chairman Timur Manurung in a press release.
Earlier this year, ICIJ’s Deforestation Inc. investigation highlighted the opaque corporate structures linking Paper Excellence to APP, a subsidiary of the Sinar Mas Group owned by Indonesia’s wealthy Widjaja family. Paper Excellence says it is owned solely by Jackson Wijaya, a member of the Widjaya family, and claims that the company operates completely independently.
After interviewing former employees and analysing shipping and court records and corporate documents spanning 15 years Deforestation Inc. reporters in Canada and France found evidence suggesting Paper Excellence and APP share a deeper relationship than was previously known. ICIJ partners also reviewed leaked emails that showed staff worked freely between the two companies.
The ICIJ’s investigation was built on a 2022 report by four environmental groups, including EPN, that examined business registries from 10 countries and offshore records in ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks database. The report said that a “nexus of factors such as family ties, overlapping management, and lobbyist filings indicate that Sinar Mas Group controls Paper Excellence.”
In April, following the Deforestation Inc. revelations, the Canadian parliament opened an ongoing probe into Paper Excellence, which reportedly controls nearly 54 million acres of forests in Canada, and has also expanded its operations in the United States.
“Paper Excellence is now the largest logging company Canada has ever seen. One of our major concerns with them is how nontransparent they’ve been with their takeover of the industry,” said Shane Moffatt, of Greenpeace Canada.
“We want to ensure the Canadian public has all the information. They deserve to know the facts about who this company is, what their intentions are and what their connections are.”
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