Singapore-based Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), part of Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Group, has been accused of illegal logging of natural forest in southwest China’s Yunnan province. The alleged deforestation was done as part of a vast wood-for-paper project, in which APP and the Yunnan government are cooperating. The project area covers almost two million hectares in Yunnan, most of which is currently primary tropical forest, Huang Xu of the environmental group Greenpeace told Asia Times Online. Despite the announcement by China’s State Forestry Administration (SFA) this March that it had stopped illegal logging by APP, sources in Yunnan this month confirmed that the logging goes on uninterrupted. In protest, a coalition of environmental organizations and student groups has initiated a boycott of APP’s products.
For more about environmental activism in China, see “Green dreams, brown reality for China.”
