LIMA (Reuters) – A palm oil industry body yesterday ordered a member company with a 5,000 hectare (12,355 acre) concession in Peru to stop developing new plantations until it can prove it has not cleared any primary forest.
The dispute comes amid growing concerns from environmentalist and indigenous communities about the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in the Peruvian Amazon in recent years.
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) said Plantaciones Pucallpa S.A.C. might have violated its rules aimed at protecting the environment and the rights of local communities.
“It appears that Plantaciones has cleared primary forest progressively since 2011,” RSPO complaints coordinator Ravin Krishnan said in a letter to the company. He gave Plantaciones 14 days to respond.
Calls to the office of Plantaciones went unanswered during regular business hours on Monday. A representative of the company did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
The complaint before RSPO was filed by the indigenous community Santa Clara de Uchunya, which accuses Plantaciones of selling illegal timber, burning down forests and planting oil palm on ancestral lands.
Destroying primary forest is illegal in Peru. But environmentalists say regional governments frequently dole out timber and oil palm concessions that contain large swaths of in-tact rainforest.
The central government in recent years ordered Plantaciones and two other palm oil companies with the same legal representatives to halt activities while it probes deforestation allegations.
