Campaigns Director Julian Newman catches up with Ali Jambi – aka Tham Hai Lee, Jambi Lee, Jenggo, Hap Ali – who went from Indonesian timber smuggler to wealthy Singaporean businessman
You’re going to hear a lot about Maura Tae, because it represents everything in Indonesia that is right and wrong, and more than anything it is a community literally fighting for its existence
The fate of a Dayak community deep in the interior of East Kalimantan demonstrates how Indonesia must safeguard the rights of indigenous people if it is to meet ambitious targets to reduce emissions from deforestation
Last year, EIA and Telapak broke the news of how villagers in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province found themselves in direct conflict with palm oil company’s bulldozers in an ongoing land rights dispute. Now the profile of the situation has been raised considerably by a report on Al Jazeera from Step Vaessen
These are just the tip of the iceberg in what’s been a highly productive and busy year for EIA, one in which we also played a key role in achieving a groundbreaking agreement on timber trade between the European Union and Indonesia, and kept tabs on supermarket promises to get rid of greenhouse gases in their fridges
A group of 16 environmental organisations are calling on Japan to put in place stronger measures to stop the trade in illegal timber, citing evidence that Japanese companies are importing timber from Samling Global, a company involved in illegal logging in Malaysian Borneo