Nestlé and Procter & Gamble fuel fires in Indonesia

Indonesia saw the return of intense and smoky fires in 2023. Fires generally correspond with Indonesia’s dry season, which runs from June into December, with fire activity peaking from August into October. Until 2 October 2023, fires had burned around 267,900 hectares since the start of the year, surpassing the area burned during all of 2022. In response to the fires and air pollution caused by the smoke across Indonesia, the environment ministry shuttered 35 concessions, including several oil palm plantations, and issued 220 warning letters to companies in October.

Nestlé and Procter & Gamble are two of the biggest consumer goods companies in the world and present themselves as sustainability leaders. Both are part of the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) - a corporate alliance whose members produce the food and household goods that millions of people use every day, supposedly committed to ending deforestation in their supply chains by 2020. But all their “updated” forest protection policies lack accountability by putting the responsibility on the intermediaries like the oil palm plantations or mills.

To make things worse, Procter & Gamble quietly published a revised Forest Commodity Policy in June 2023 that is no longer prohibiting forest degradation caused by industrial logging in its wood pulp supply chain. This new loophole will have devastating consequences in the last remaining intact forest landscapes. Both companies are doing business with rogue palm oil and paper producers who recklessly burn precious rainforests to the ground to expand their monocultures.

Tell Nestlé and Procter & Gamble to stop setting Indonesia’s rainforests on fire – clean up your palm oil and paper supply chains!

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