indonesia

Indonesia banned the popular video sharing site Vimeo, saying it contains nudity, which officials in the world's most populous Muslim country consider to be pornographic material. Information and Communication Minister Tiffatul Sembiring said that his ministry's found nearly 15,000 videos tagged with words related to nudity and ordered all Indonesia-based Internet service providers to block the New York-based site.

Celebrities, businesses and even the U.S. State Department have bought bogus Facebook likes, Twitter followers or YouTube viewers from offshore "click farms," where workers tap, tap, tap the thumbs up button, view videos or retweet comments to inflate social media numbers. But an Associated Press examination has found a growing global marketplace for fake clicks, which tech companies struggle to police.

Last week, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) contacted Cargill employees in over 20 countries to alert them to the company’s ties to rainforest destruction and orangutan extinction. The email urged employees to watch a recent eye-opening prime time NBC news story profiling the imminent extinction of orangutans due to unchecked palm oil expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Last week, RAN joined sixty environmental and social organizations, including a dozen Indonesian groups, in signing an open letter to banks and other financial institutions across the globe warning them to avoid investments in pulp and paper industry projects associated with deforestation and human right abuses in Indonesia.

The President of Indonesia and top leaders of major Indonesian corporations were greeted by a colorful group of rainforest activists this week as they visited Wall Street to secure billions of dollars in US investment in some of the most environmentally and socially destructive industries in Indonesia.
Supporters of Rainforest Action Network joined with members of Rainforest Relief and Global Justice for Animals and Ecology to greet the CEOs and CFOs from Indonesia’s biggest banks—e.g. Mandiri Bank, Bank Republic of Indonesia, Bank Central Asia—as well as executives from palm oil (big ag), coal, oil and gas, steel, telecommunications and pulp and paper companies as they hobnobbed with US institutional investors trying to make deals.

A recent Indonesia Finance Today article clarifies that Cargill plans to expand its plantation land in Indonesia to 90,000 hectares in April 2013 and that while the company’s crude palm oil production (CPO) in Indonesia is currently at 300,000 tons, it’s targeting to reach one million tons.
This is an interesting turn of events. In response to RAN’s April 2012 exposé profiling the demise of one of the world’s most important tropical rainforests for oil palm expansion, Cargill aggressively argued in a public statement that it “does not import Indonesian palm oil to the United States” in an attempt to minimize its role as one of the largest palm oil traders in the world and evade responsibility for the Indonesia deforestation crisis.