"Deforestation .. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/deforestation .. in the name of economic development has occurred routinely over many decades without regard to its devastating consequences. It is completely unsustainable for governments to continue to provide concessions, subsidies and tax breaks to business when logging, oil extraction, mining for minerals, fires, palm oil plantations, large scale commercial agriculture, cattle ranching and road construction continue to diminish the earth’s finite, invaluable rainforests."
was missed in the original post .. one article from it ..
100,000 may have died but there is still no justice over Indonesian air pollution
A fightback against the perpetrators is underway, but litigation is proving unappealing and burdensome for victims
The smoke contains dangerous chemicals such as carbon monoxide, ammonia and cyanide and has reportedly caused thousands of premature deaths. Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty
Elodie Aba and Bobbie Sta. Maria
Business & Human Rights Resource Centre
Saturday 4 February 2017 21.00 AEDT Last modified on Tuesday 7 February 2017 22.46 AEDT
It started with a mild cough. Muhanum Anggriawati was just 12 years old when the cough began, transforming within weeks into a violent hacking that brought up a yellowish-black liquid.
At the end of last year, her father told an Indonesian court how she had been taken into hospital, and treated with oxygen therapy, then with a defibrillator. Nothing, however, had worked. After a week on a breathing machine, she died in the hospital, her lungs still full of the foul mucus.
Anggriawati is believed to have been one of many victims of the haze, or air pollution, that regularly spreads across Indonesia .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/indonesia .. because of the huge deforestation fires linked to palm oil and other agribusiness.
The Global Fire Emissions Database reports .. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/10/toxi-o10.html .. that in 2015, fires in Indonesia generated about 600m tonnes of greenhouse gases, which is roughly equivalent to Germany’s entire annual output.
The smoke contains dangerous chemicals .. http://blog.cifor.org/36467/dont-inhale-scientists-look-at-what-the-indonesian-haze-is-made-of?fnl=en .. such as carbon monoxide, ammonia and cyanide. A study by Harvard and Columbia universities revealed that the haze may have caused the premature deaths of more than 100,000 people in south-east Asia in 2015. The authors estimated that there were 91,000 deaths in Indonesia; 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore.
Anggriawati’s father is one of a number of grieving parents in Riau who have taken the brave step of bringing a lawsuit against the police for terminating investigations against 15 companies linked to haze-causing burning activities in 2015. His suit is just one of many uphill legal struggles to seek accountability. But relief is limited. The governments of these countries have rejected .. http://www.voanews.com/a/southeast-asia-haze-study/3518958.html .. the results of the study, citing inaccurate data. Indonesia reports just 24 deaths.
We visited Indonesia late last year. Lawyers and advocates bringing cases on behalf of the families and communities told us about the difficulty they face in meeting strict evidentiary requirements to establish where the burning is occurring, who is responsible, and the causal link between the burning and health problems in affected communities.
In one case, satellite images were not accepted as evidence. Judges and even witnesses may hesitate to impute causality or link the health impacts to the haze, even when there is scientific basis to support it. Lawyers and advocates also intimated that the lack of access to evidence, especially company information including maps that show plantation boundaries, makes it difficult to build a case even when the evidence of burning is present.
Legal accountability and access to justice are vital to this fight. While strong executive acts and voluntary company measures such as certification and zero-burning policies are helpful, it is even more important that those responsible are held to account.
Last year, Singapore’s National Environment Agency issued preventive measures notices to six Indonesian companies suspected of starting fires. And in June 2016, the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry said that it was planning to sue five companies .. http://www.asianews.network/content/5-palm-oil-firms-indonesia-face-lawsuit-over-forest-fires-21064 .. over alleged forest fires the year before.
Communities and NGOs are also engaged in various efforts to promote increased accountability. Greenpeace has set up an interactive map .. http://www.greenpeace.org/seasia/id/Global/seasia/Indonesia/Code/Forest-Map/en/index.html .. showing company concessions and active fires to create more transparency on land tenure. Forest & Finance .. http://forestsandfinance.org/ .. provides public data showing the role of finance in deforestation and aims to encourage the financial sector to adopt policies to prevent funding of this practice. NGOs are helping empower communities to document their experiences related to haze, including through the use of technology.
But these efforts must be accompanied by heightened measures to remove barriers to legal accountability and ensure that in cases of abuse, communities are able turn to courts as powerful and effective instruments for remedy and justice. In all the countries concerned, there should be collective action to: increase the capacity of courts to handle environmental cases; address corruption in law enforcement and judicial systems; require greater transparency among companies; promote access to information; and ensure the personal security of investigators and seekers of justice. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/feb/04/indonesian-air-pollution-death-justice
Australia's delays on palm oil labelling 'hastening deforestation and orangutan deaths'
Environmentalists say mandatory labelling on food would limit demand for palm oil products and reduce destructive impact of plantations
A worker unloads palm fruit at a palm oil plantation on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Environmentalists say the plantations are destroying rainforests and orangutan habitats. Photograph: Amnesty International
This article is 2 months old
Christopher Knaus @knausc
Monday 5 December 2016 16.15 AEDT Last modified on Thursday 9 February 2017 20.08 AEDT
Environmentalists have warned that Australia’s repeated delays on mandatory palm oil labelling are allowing deforestation and the destruction of orangutan habitats to continue unabated.
A proposal requiring palm oils .. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/palm-oil .. to be specifically listed on food labels has now been under consideration by Australian and New Zealand ministers for more than five years.
The proposal again came before the Australian and New Zealand Ministerial Forum on Food Regulation late last month, but any decision was put off until at least April.
The Zoos Victoria chief executive officer, Jenny Gray, who is leading one of several concurrent palm oil campaigns, said she was confused about what additional information the ministerial council was seeking.
“We know we’re losing a thousand orangutans a year at the moment, so if we delay for another year, that’s more habitats destroyed, that’s more orangutans impacted by this,” Gray said.
“Longer delays, it really is unclear why we would want to do that when this is such an urgent issue,” she said.
The decision on palm oil labelling is wrapped up in a broader review of labelling laws, which began in 2009.
In 2011, an expert panel, led by former Labor health minister Neal Blewett, recommended that added sugars, oils or fats be individually labelled.
The ministerial forum made some progress at its meeting late last month, splitting its consideration of palm oil from other labelling changes.
Blewett told Guardian Australia he thought the process had been “fairly slow”, but said the labelling reforms were complex and presented plenty of issues for stakeholders to “fight over”.
“It’s been fairly slow, I’ve got to say. And I’ve not been following it closely because I’ve not been involved in the later debates,” he said.
He said he had recommended mandatory palm oil labelling on health grounds, because it was arguably not as healthy as other vegetable oils.
“The value side issues… you can’t start laying down rules for those,” he said.
“What you can do is get the market to work effectively so that companies will feel the need to, when they list vegetable oils, find it necessary to say that they haven’t got palm oils.”
The move faces opposition from the food industry, represented by the Australian Food and Grocery Council.
A council spokesman said many Australian companies had already begun using only sustainably sourced palm oil in their products.
He said that created a risk palm oil labelling would confuse consumers, who would be unable to tell sustainable and unsustainable products apart.
“The problem is there is low understanding of [certified sustainable palm oil] and consumers may confuse products that use responsibly sourced palm oil with those that don’t,” he said.
“We want to encourage companies to make the substantial investment in CSPO, but potentially lumping CSPO and non-CSPO products under one label may act as a disincentive.”
The EU’s experience, according to Gray, showed that the costs to industry were negligible.
She said it may actually be more costly for companies to maintain two different labelling regimes; one for Australia and another for the EU or US.
“It’s easy to say we don’t want change because it would cost us, it would be really good to see how they would quantify that,” Gray said. “Then to give the consumer the choice, I think people are happy to pay a few extra cents to know that they’re buying a sustainable product.”
The ministerial forum will meet again on 28 April.
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