W. 1.2 Million Hectares Of Primary Forest Slated For Palm Oil, Ind. Firm Denies Environmental Damage

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JAKARTA - Sinar Mas Group, one of Indonesia's top palm oil growers, denied on Friday accusations that its activities were damaging the environment and said it would stick to plans to expand its plantations.

Greenpeace activists have targeted Sinar Mas in a recent campaign for contributing to deforestation in Indonesia, which is blamed as a key source greenhouse gas emissions in the Southeast Asian country.

"We should have been arrested if we had ever been involved in deforestation," Gandi Sulistiyanto, a managing director of Sinar Mas Group, told Reuters. He said the company only opened up new plantations in degraded land that had been farmed on or previously logged and not rainforest.

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According to Greenpeace, Sinar Mas has 200,000 hectares of unplanted concessions in rainforest in Indonesia and plans to acquire an additional 1.1 million hectares, mainly in Papua. Sulistiyanto said the firm was currently focused on managing the 11,000 hectares that it has planted with oil palm in the past 14 years in Papua.

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http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/52142