--- title: Indonesia's Palm-Oil Dilemma: Cash In or Fight for the Forests? | TIME description: With demand for palm oil on the rise, Indonesia is leveling forests to create plantations. TIME meets two men in Borneo who take different approaches to protect their village environments canonical: https://time.com/video/FgTPvQFt/ og:title: Indonesia's Palm-Oil Dilemma: Cash In or Fight for the Forests? og:description: With demand for palm oil on the rise, Indonesia is leveling forests to create plantations. TIME meets two men in Borneo who take different approaches to protect their village environments og:url: https://time.com/video/FgTPvQFt/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/FgTPvQFt/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Indonesia's Palm-Oil Dilemma: Cash In or Fight for the Forests? twitter:description: With demand for palm oil on the rise, Indonesia is leveling forests to create plantations. TIME meets two men in Borneo who take different approaches to protect their village environments twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/FgTPvQFt/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Indonesia's Palm-Oil Dilemma: Cash In or Fight for the Forests? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. A TIME subscription provides full access to that journalism in print and digital, from $20 a year, and can be cancelled at any time. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Indonesia's Palm-Oil Dilemma: Cash In or Fight for the Forests? [Watch (HLS stream): Indonesia's Palm-Oil Dilemma: Cash In or Fight for the Forests?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/FgTPvQFt.m3u8) (7:04)  _Published 2011-07-25. With demand for palm oil on the rise, Indonesia is leveling forests to create plantations. TIME meets two men in Borneo who take different approaches to protect their village environments_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:15 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The Aftermath of Indonesia's Devastating Earthquake](/video/6RtgT18j/) ### The Aftermath of Indonesia's Devastating Earthquake [Indonesia Has Declared a State of Emergency as Borneo Oil Spill Spreads](/video/pdDgXqOS/) ### Indonesia Has Declared a State of Emergency as Borneo Oil Spill Spreads [Indonesia's Green Gamble](/video/65SwiYMy/) ### Indonesia's Green Gamble --- ## Transcript [ FOREIGN ] Victor Torran is a field- supervisor for one of the largest palm oil companies in Indonesia. [ FOREIGN ] Aside from being a little muddy it's a good job and a steady income. [ SOUND ] But Victor says it comes with a personal toll. [ FOREIGN ]. Everything the company does goes against my conscience. But the question remains, who should work from the inside to inform everyone? Who should be pushing that these things are right, that these things are acceptable, these things are not. [ FOREIGN ] Victor is from Lemon Satang, one of two villages here in the west of Borneo that has recently come to the difficult decision of whether to allow the PT Cal Palm Oil Company onto their land. [ FOREIGN ]. Please don't clear that one, save the forest for wood. We would have nothing left to build houses with for many years if we cleared everything. [ FOREIGN ] His village chose to welcome the growing industry. And now, Victor, like many of his neighbors, is working in it. But he's worried jobs like his will come at the expense of the forests, agriculture, and clean rivers his village lives off of. [ FOREIGN ] It's not just about the money. I wanna see how long their promises will last. Will they sincerely keep the regulations, and be fair to our community? The father of three has good reason to be sceptical. The palm oil industry has a pretty bad track record here, from abusing local labour to pilfering forests, a lack of regulation in Indonesia has allowed production of the plant oil known as liquid gold here to boom at the expense of those living off the country's land. Ten miles away, [ UNKNOWN ] shares Victor's concerns. But as the leader of his village, he was able to keep [ UNKNOWN ] off his land. [ FOREIGN ] In my opinion, plantations are only owned by certain groups of people. And they don't necessarily create prosperity. [ FOREIGN ] The village of [ UNKNOWN ] straddles the northwest corner of PT Cal's 50, 000 acre plantation, but no palm oil plants can be seen here. I said for now, we should be patient. We should first see our neighbour's land that oil palm plantations, and then compare it to ours with no palm. [ FOREIGN ] [ CROSSTALK ] This day, I've never changed my mind again. [ SOUND ] Nastrin is no stranger to making profit off of nature. He earned a good living in the 90's running a logging company that illegally cut down trees. [ FOREIGN ] [ CROSSTALK ] I don't know how many trees I cut down, a countless number. After his conscience got the best of him, Bastern quit the business, became an environmentalist, and now uses his elected power to save the trees he once cut down. My worry is that if our forests are cleared, our children will not be able to see what protected wood looks like, or what protected animals look like. [ FOREIGN ] These are not only vast forest landscapes which are home to the species such as orangutans, or elephants, rhinos, but they're also some of the globally most important reservoirs of carbon. While Bastron and Victor look at the local detriment to palm oil plantations, Adam Tomasek director of the Heart of Borneo Initiative for the World Wide Fund for Nature. Sees it as a global problem. Sustainably managing the forest, and the carbon stocks, that they contain here in Indonesia, is not only important locally. Not only important regionally, but an extremely critical factor in the global approach to dealing with climate change. According to the WWF, palm oil can be found in about half of the packaged food in a grocery store. The effects of mass producing this commodity got global attention a few years ago. After Greenpeace launched an investigation into [ UNKNOWN ], a major player in the industry. In their report, the Indonesian conglomerate was accused of cutting down important wildlife preserves, and illegally planting on peat lands. Thereby distributing vast amounts of carbon into the air. As a result, [ UNKNOWN ] lost major contracts with Unilever, Kraft, and Nestle. What we consider, we are doing already good practices, but we would like to re- check again whether anything that we can improve from that. CEO Franky Widjaja says Sinar Mas is working to insure these things don't happen again, but says, change won't come overnight. It doesn't mean that because Greenpeace keep on hunting on us. Then we start to do that and then suddenly it become good. I don't think that it can be done just turn the leaf like that, yeah. But [ UNKNOWN ] Moss's promises of reform are coinciding with record profits for its palm oil sector, that recently propelled its founder Eka Tjipta Widjaja to status of richest man in Indonesia. PT Call looking to avoid the PR missteps of [ INAUDIBLE ] says it wants to do things differently. This is the the way in the world now to make sure that all pump cultivation is a sustainable business. The company is applying for something called RSPO Certification, which is basically a stamp of approval from the internationally recognized. Round table, unsustainable palm oil. Made up of environmental NGOs, government officials and palm oil companies. As part of this process, PT Cal will conserve nearly half its land. Use safer pesticides. And negoiate profit sharing agreements with the local villages. [ COUGH ] And that means persuading village leaders like Bastrin. [ FOREIGN ] One guy from PT Cal came to my house and offered me a motor bike. He said is that your bike, maybe we can get you a new one. PT Cal denies offering bribes to anyone. But Basterin says they're not the only one's applying the pressure. He says government officials have threatened him, and many of his own villagers would rather have the jobs. Despite the pressure, he has held the company off their land for now. But with the local election around the corner, he's not sure how much longer it can last. [ FOREIGN ] I'm not optimistic, because I don't know how the next leaders will think. Perhaps the future leaders won't have the same views as me. A quick drive down the road, Basterin can see how this future might look, in Victor's village. Where jobs are up, but so is uncertainty. And, a great deal of faith has been placed in the hands of a palm oil company. [ FOREIGN ] We try our best to hold on to what is still there. Onto what can still be saved. But that's all we can do. [ FOREIGN ] From West Kalimantan, Indonesia This is Jacob Templin with Time Video and the International Reporting Project. [ MUSIC ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Indonesia's Palm-Oil Dilemma: Cash In or Fight for the Forests?","description":"With demand for palm oil on the rise, Indonesia is leveling forests to create plantations. 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