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A villager of Rio Mukti in Donggala, Central Sulawesi, protesting against AAL in March 2024. Image courtesy of Friends of the Earth.
The United Nations has called out Indonesia’s No. 2 palm oil company for alleged human rights and environmental abuses, the first time it has singled out a company rather than the industry.
Various U.N. agencies and officials have long highlighted issues within the palm oil industry in Indonesia, the world’s top producer of the commodity, but this time the specific allegations are against PT Astra Agro Lestari (AAL), the second-largest palm oil company in the country.
The allegations are laid out in letters sent in October 2024 by a group of U.N. special rapporteurs to AAL; its parent company, Astra International, one of Indonesia’s biggest conglomerates; Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong-based conglomerate that’s Astra’s parent company; and representatives of the governments of Indonesia and China.
The letters raise concerns about systemic human rights and environmental abuses linked to AAL’s palm oil production on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
For one, AAL and its subsidiaries allegedly operate without necessary permits on Indigenous ancestral lands and farming communities’ land, without the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of the Indigenous residents and without meaningful consultation with the farming communities, the rapporteurs said.
As a result, communities affected by AAL’s operations have repeatedly called on the company to return land taken without their consent over the past several years.
But when affected communities peacefully protest against AAL, they’re often met with violence on the part of local police, military or private security forces hired by the company, the rapporteurs wrote.
In some cases, protests are followed by arrests and imprisonment of community leaders, sometimes based on fabricated or trumped-up charges, they noted.
“The violence, intimidation, criminalisation of demonstrators and the overall impunity have generated an atmosphere of fear and violence, which deters communities from continuing to actively defend their land and rights,” the rapporteurs wrote. “The criminalisation of community members diverts community efforts to free those criminalised rather than requesting accountability from corporations.”
The rapporteurs said they’re “seriously concerned” about the alleged intimidation and criminalization and called on AAL to end the persecution of individuals defending their land and their rights.
Besides land grabbing and intimidation and criminalization of local communities, AAL also faces allegations of environmental degradation, such as pollution of water resources.
If true, these allegations would violate the “rights to housing, land and property, adequate food, safe drinking water and the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment of affected farmers communities and Indigenous Peoples,” the rapporteurs said.
These allegations have long been documented by independent watchdogs such as Friends of the Earth (FoE) U.S. and its Indonesian and Dutch counterparts, Walhi and Milieudefensie.
The company was most recently embroiled in a string of violence and criminalization in October 2024, which saw community members clash several times with antiriot police accompanying AAL subsidiary PT Agro Nusa Abadi (ANA) in harvesting palm oil fruit on lands claimed by the communities.
