JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has ordered a palm oil company to pay 1 billion rupiah ($61,000) in fines for shortchanging villagers by not sufficiently paying them according to a profit-sharing agreement. The company in question, PT Hardaya Inti Plantations (HIP), has been embroiled in conflicts with villagers in its concession on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for years. The villagers in Buol district, grouped under a farmer cooperative called Amanah, said they hadn’t been paid for harvests the company reaped from their land going back to 2018, or even earlier in some cases. This, despite HIP having struck a deal with the villagers in 2008, in which the company would do the work of cultivating the oil palms and harvesting the fruit on the villagers’ land, effectively expanding the company’s total planted area, while the villagers, in return, would receive a cut of the profits from the palm fruit from their land. This arrangement is known as plasma, which is mandatory under Indonesian law. The conflicts recently intensified, and in May, clashes erupted between the villagers and HIP workers who tried to harvest palm oil fruits from the plasma land. At least nine villagers and one HIP worker were injured in two separate clashes. Indonesia’s business competition regulator, the KPPU, has been investigating alleged violations of the plasma scheme since 2019, and in the process, it found HIP to be violating the scheme. For one, HIP fails to be transparent in its management of the plasma plantation, as it’s…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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