![\"School](\"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/static\/planet4-malaysia-stateless\/2019\/11\/e914cf50-gp0stu08z.jpg\")
Students wear protective masks as the air is filled with thick haze from forest fires in Palangkaraya city, Central Kalimantan.\u00a0 \u00a9 Jurnasyanto Sukarno \/ Greenpeace<\/p><\/div>\n
The fires and their smokey haze are causing health problems for people in Indonesia,\u00a0 Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. They are also driving the climate catastrophe. This year alone, the fires in\u00a0Indonesia have already emitted almost as much CO2\u00a0as the entire United Kingdom does in one year.<\/a><\/p>\n In September, with a heavy heart\u00a0I wrote a story<\/a>\u00a0as Greenpeace\u00a0stepped back<\/a>\u00a0from discussions with Wilmar, Unilever, Mondelez, and Aidenvironment to collaboratively create a credible, independent, and transparent monitoring platform. This platform would have allowed companies, non-governmental organisations, and other stakeholders to come together and monitor progress on no deforestation commitments. This would have meant calling out companies still engaging in deforestation and human rights exploitation, but allowing sustainable businesses to gain priority in global markets.<\/p>\n This was an opportunity for unlikely but powerful allies to build something that could not only have changed the impact of palm oil farming on forests in Southeast Asia, but also the impact of commodity trade on the rest of the world. Sadly, we could not even gain agreement on the basic elements of a credible, independent, and transparent monitoring platform. The research released today by Greenpeace International, may explain the reasons.<\/p>\n The fires blazing in Indonesia, that have placed nearly 10 million children at risk<\/a>, are linked to companies widely considered to be \u201csustainability leaders\u201d in palm oil.\u00a0 Greenpeace International\u2019s research found that Unilever, Mondelez, Nestle, and P&G are each linked to nearly 10,000 fire hotspots in 2019 alone.\u00a0 Each company is also linked to nearly 200,000 hectares of land burned between 2015-2018. Does this look like progress? These companies do not appear to be serious about their deforestation commitments.<\/p>\n Forest and plantation fires in sub-district Jekan Raya, Palangkaraya city, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. \u00a9 Ulet Ifansasti \/ Greenpeace<\/p><\/div>\n One specific incident involves Wilmar and GAMA, now rebranded as \u201cKPN.\u201d\u00a0 Following a\u00a0global campaign by Greenpeace<\/a>\u00a0in 2013, Wilmar adopted a no deforestation, no peatland, no human exploitation (NDPE) policy to much\u00a0global fanfare<\/a>.\u00a0 However, rather than fully implementing these commitments and addressing outstanding problems, Wilmar sold its\u00a0problematic concessions<\/a>\u00a0linked to fires, deforestation, or human rights abuses to other companies, most\u00a0notably GAMA\/KPN<\/a>, described as \u2018a clearinghouse for troublesome Wilmar subsidiaries<\/a>\u2019. Five years later in 2018, Greenpeace\u00a0exposed that the companies that comprised GAMA<\/a>\u00a0were in fact controlled by Wilmar\u2019s co-founder and his brother.<\/p>\n Wilmar wanted to have its cake and eat it too: it wanted to receive international praise for its sustainability commitments, while still profiting by buying from supplier groups driving deforestation.\u00a0 Following Greenpeace\u2019s 2018 high profile global campaign, three major things changed: GAMA\/KPN was suspended from Wilmar\u2019s supply chain, Wilmar\u00a0officially separated from Martua Sitorus<\/a>, and Wilmar committed to a\u00a0joint statement<\/a>\u00a0ensuring it would no longer be linked to supplier groups that were violating its NDPE policy. Unfortunately, soon after, Wilmar contracted the consultancy AidEnvironment \u2013 who was also contracted by GAMA\/KPN \u2013 and by March 2019, Wilmar had decided to resume purchasing palm oil from GAMA\/KPN \u201cafter consultation with Aidenvironment<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n So far this year, GAMA\/KPN and Wilmar are directly linked to over 500 and 250 fires hotspots respectively, in Indonesia. But those dramatic figures tell only a small part of this story.\u00a0 Achieving zero deforestation \u2013 something Unilever, Mondelez, Wilmar and others committed to nearly a decade ago \u2013 means no longer purchasing from groups still engaged in deforestation. Therefore, if these companies are still purchasing from one subsidiary of a producer group that still profits from deforestation through other companies it owns, this does not help the forests, the climate, or the haze.<\/p>\n![\"Forest](\"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/static\/planet4-malaysia-stateless\/2019\/11\/f6db68c9-gp0sttqjr.jpg\")
![\"Forest](\"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/static\/planet4-malaysia-stateless\/2019\/11\/94d3c1bc-gp0sttw0b.jpg\")