Indonesia’s rainforests offer shield, livelihoods and cultural identity to around 40 million Indonesians, while millions of others have indirect benefits from them. The economic value of the benefits from intact forests to these people is unquantifiable, but likely to total billions of dollars in food, jobs and other cultural benefits.

APP claims that its business it the only way to bring development and to fight poverty and attacks environmentalist saying that they are prevent the development in a poor country. The reality is very different. Villagers and indigenous communities evicted from their lands, lose their homes and their means of subsistence, to give more and more land to the massive expansion of pulp plantations, to increment the profits of the rich people: the founder of APP and Sinar Mas Group, Eka Tjipta Widjaja, was considered in 2001 the “richest man of Indonesia”,[1] with fortune of a fortune amounting to US $12 billion and a net worth of US $3.2 billion.

There have been many reports by NGOs and the media of APP committing human rights abuses in Riau and Jambi provinces, seizing land claimed by local communities, intimidating villagers, and prohibiting villagers’ access to previously public areas.[2]

•  In August 2008, the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights investigated claims human rights abuses in the prolonged land dispute between the Sakai tribe and an APP subsidiary and supplier, and finding that the rights of the Sakai people had been violated because of the company’s continual intimidation.[3]
• In December 2008, Riau police destroyed approximately 500 homes and evicted residents in an area where APP’s subsidiary company had been in a land dispute with the community. One child died during the conflict, homes were firebombed from helicopters and 70 villagers arrested.[4]
•  In 2007, villagers in Jambi burned APP logging equipment as revenge for the company’s destruction of their oil palm plantations.
• On 10 July 2009, in Jambi province, Sumatra, security officers of the APP company Lonthar Papirus, detained illegally[5] three members of a French TV news crew. Ciryl Payen, Gilaume Martin, and Dewi Arilaha, for investigating on illegal logging.
• Deforestation and habitat destruction driven by APP has directly escalated conflicts and fatalities of people and tigers. Most violent incidents between people and tigers in Riau Province since 1997 had occurred near forested areas being cleared by Sinar Mas affiliated APP wood suppliers. [6]