UPM-Kymmene defends link APRIL
UPM-Kymmene defends link APRIL
HELSINKI (Reuters): Finnish forest industry group UPM-Kymmene defended on Thursday its alliance with Indonesian paper maker APRIL against environmental groups insisting that it pull out of cooperation with the Southeast Asian group.
"The sharing of best practices and transfer of knowledge will ensure that ... development is carried out to the highest environmental standards," UPM officials told a news conference.
Environmentalists in Finland, including the Finnish section of the Friends of the Earth, this week stepped up a campaign to halt UPM-Kymmene's joint venture with Singapore-based APRIL (Asia Pacific Resources International Holding)[ARH.N].
UPM-Kymmene and APRIL in September this year set a joint venture for fine-paper operations giving UPM-Kymmene access to the fast-growing Asian paper market.
The project has become a red cloth for those here who say that APRIL's forestry spoils natural rain forests and allege that the Indonesian group tramples indigenous people's land rights and discriminates against organized labor.
UPM-Kymmene on Thursday dismissed the charges and painted a picture of an unfaltering process of globalization leading to greater prosperity and higher environmental standards, and it even linked paper consumption to the expanding democracy.
"Crucially, the growing interdependence of international business offers the prospect of improving environmental and social sustainability all around the world. The new partnership should be seen in this context," UPM said in a statement.
To meet some of the demand generated by rapid long-term economic growth in China and elsewhere in Asia, just 1.5 percent of permanent forestland in Indonesia would be used for pulp and paper operations, UPM-Kymmene said.
The forests culled by APRIL under a government concession in Riau, Sumatra, are "logged-over and degraded natural forests from which the largest and most valuable trees have already been removed for other purposes by other parties," UPM said.
But it also pledged to have a full environmental audit of APRIL's forestry operations in Riau made by an internationally known outside specialist with the aim of drawing up a detailed plan for forestry certification.
UPM-Kymmene moreover said that plantation forestry reduces the area needed to produce wood to one sixth of what it would be if producers logged natural forests.
"Wood raw material for a 750,000 t/a pulp mill, for example in Riau, can be sustainable supplied from a tree plantation of some 100,000 hectares, which is only one tenth of the forest area needed for such a mill in Scandinavia," UPM-Kymmene said.
The company said it was committed in its alliance with APRIL to international environmental norms, that APRIL's pulp and paper mills were built to the latest Scandinavian environmental standards and that APRIL had a strict no-burn policy in its forests.
UPM-Kymmene defended the social record of its partner, saying that it provides important infrastructure, pays above-average wages, allows worker associations and does not move traditional inhabitants from its land concessions.