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6th December 2004 deutsche Version... Unique Peat Forests on Sumatra under Threat The company APRIL wants to clear another area of rainforest for paper / ROBIN WOOD warns that this will cause massive damage to environment and climate The pulp and paper company APRIL, whose headquarter is in Singapore, has applied for a new concession in one of Sumatra's last areas of tropical lowland forest. The company is planning to eliminate the rainforest on the site and use the removed timber to produce paper. ROBIN WOOD supports the Indonesian environmental movement in preventing this concession from being granted. ROBIN WOOD also urges the company´s German trade partner PAPIER UNION to immediately cease trading in APRIL products. The irreplaceable ecological zone APRIL is planning to exploit covers 215,790 hectares of swamp forest in the east of the province of Riau. Over a period of seven years, the company stands to gain 3.2 million cubic metres of tropical timber from this rainforest area to produce pulp. The Governor of the province of Riau supports the combine's application, however, a final decision has not been made yet. The planned clearing would cut the world's second largest area of this type of peat forest in half. The peat forests on Sumatra play a particularly important role for the regional and global climate. Their destruction would lead to large amounts of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere, thus adding significantly to the greenhouse effect. In the magazine Nature, scientists warn prior to the UN conference on climate, which starts today in Buenos Aires, that the Kyoto protocol might be without effect if the Indonesian peat forests were not protected by any better means. Although Indonesian law forbids any changes inflicted upon forests on a peat layer of more than three metres, reality reveals quite a different picture. APRIL has already destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of such forest. Indonesia has the highest rate of forest clearings worldwide. Indonesian environmental organisations therefore demand a moratorium on industrial logging in their country and urge traders worldwide not to purchase any products gained from the destruction of their forests. ROBIN WOOD supports this demand, especially since German companies are involved in this business too. Karstadt, Deutsche Post and the Metro Group have already been convinced by ROBIN WOOD to remove from their product range all paper which is sourced from the rainforest on Sumatra. But the wholesaler PAPIER UNION, whose seat is in Hamburg, still insists on trading in office paper made by APRIL. "The German company PAPIER UNION is one of the main accomplices of the rainforest eliminator APRIL in Europe", says Jens Wieting, ROBIN WOOD's Expert on Tropical Rainforests. "We are asking PAPIER UNION to stop this business." Until this objective is reached, ROBIN WOOD suggests that the customers of PAPIER UNION look for other suppliers who are not partners in the crime of environmental destruction and expulsion. Contact: Jens Wieting, Expert on Tropical Rainforests, Phone +49 40 - 380 892 15, tropenwald@robinwood.de Ute Bertrand, Press Spokesperson, Phone +49 40 - 380 892 22, presse@robinwood.de New concession fact sheet by Friends of the Earth http://www.maanystavat.fi/april ROBIN WOOD Sumatra research including photos and maps (german) http://www.robinwood.de/sumatrarecherche Comment on PAPIER UNION press release http://www.robinwood.de/papierunion