"Forest Peoples Programme complaint against Golden Agri Resources upheld", 9 March 2015

[T]he Complaints Panel of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)...sent a letter to Golden Agri Resources noting that it has ‘reasonable grounds’ to find that the company has ‘breached the RSPO’s Principles and Criteria’. Golden Agri Resources is the Singapore-based company which holds over a quarter of a million hectares of palm oil plantations in Indonesia operating under the brand name Sinar Mas...The decision comes in response to a...complaint filed with the RSPO by Forest Peoples Programme in October 2014, which documented how the company's plans to expand its plantations in eighteen of its subsidiaries in Indonesian Borneo were in violation of the RSPO’s New Plantings Procedure and were based on assessments that were fraudulent and which ignored compliance failures by the company which had already been exposed by FPP and admitted by the company. FPP’s studies showed how GAR was in multiple violation of RSPO’s requirements that lands only be acquired from indigenous peoples and local communities with their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). GAR’s own submissions to the New Plantings Procedures also revealed that 16 of the 18 operations lacked legally required long term ‘business use permits’...In response to the complaint, Golden Agri Resources announced...that it was withdrawing its New Planting Procedure submissions and later confirmed that it had halted all land clearance...It also embarked on a process of ‘risk assessment’ of its 18 operations and began to remedy some of the gaps in its land acquisition process and High Conservation Value assessments. The recent decision by the RSPO finds that GAR’s operations breach RSPO standards through lack of required permits (HGU) and lack of adequate High Conservation Value assessments and because the company has 'not got the full consent of the communities on the concession to utilize their land for the purposes of oil palm development’.