The chairman of an Indonesian palm oil producer hit by a boycott over allegations it is destroying tropical rainforest deliberately says its plantations are 100 per cent sustainable.

Greenpeace, the UK-based environmental group, published the latest in a series of reports this month, alleging that Singapore-listed Golden Agri Resources and other forest products companies controlled by Indonesia’s Widjaja family have destroyed rainforest areas and undermined endangered species.

The latest Greenpeace report accuses Golden Agri, which accounts for 10 per cent of Indonesian palm oil production, of violating promises to become sustainable and seeking to expand its land area vastly to continue the practices.

However, Franky Widjaja, chairman and chief executive, said Golden Agri had abided by every requirement of the Indonesian government and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a monitoring group that includes the WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, in making its plantations fully sustainable.

“We have been following that RSPO standard with the philosophy of continuous improvement,” Mr Widjaja said. “Golden Agri is an industrial leader in the palm oil field and we feel that we have a lot of good practices. We follow a very high standard on environmental issues.”

Mr Widjaja said Golden Agri had been licensed by national and local government agencies to cultivate 100,000 hectares beyond its existing 430,000 hectares.

The increase in Golden Agri’s plantable land holdings is likely to alarm Greenpeace, which says the group cannot be trusted to respect conservation rules. Greenpeace has also levelled strong criticism at the rainforest activities of Associated Pulp & Paper, the logging giant also controlled by the family.

The Widjaja companies, which are loosely grouped for marketing purposes under the name Sinar Mas, deny most of the allegations. Golden Agri says any breaches of environmental regulations have been mistakes by local managers who have been suspended.

The reports drew global publicity, prompting Unilever, Nestlé and Kraft Foods, the consumer products groups, to suspend purchases of Golden Agri palm oil products.

Mr Widjaja said the impact of the western moratoriums was modest. Golden Agri’s annual report says Europe accounted for 2.9 per cent of its $2.3bn revenues in 2009, with Asia accounting for 89 per cent.

He declined to discuss the detailed allegations in the Greenpeace reports – Burning in Borneo, Illegal Forest Clearance, Rainforest and Peatland Destruction, and Pulping the Planet – ahead of the release of an independent verification report, which is expected to be published at the end of July.

However, Mr Widjaja said Golden Agri would act quickly on any charges authenticated by the report, being conducted by experts from the British Standards Institute, Control Union Certifications of the Netherlands and Indonesia’s Bogor Agricultural Institute.

“There are no compromises. We are going to do it very seriously,” he said.

Mr Widjaja said Greenpeace had misrepresented the activities of Golden Agri, failing to take into account the complexity of monitoring its operations, which employ 110,000 people across 5,000 kilometres of the Indonesian archipelago from Sumatra to Papua.

“As a big company you are bound to [have] problems here and there because of the knowledge of the managers, but as a corporate, we believe in sustainability and we are very stringent in our environmental commitment,” he said. “On any issues of those managers not complying ... we will take very strict action.”

Mr Widjaja said every hectare planted by Golden Agri for palm oil was on degraded land or secondary forest – where the original trees had already been removed – all of which had been zoned by the government for plantations and licensed by both federal and provincial authorities. None was primary rainforest.

“We welcome criticism, and we do the corrective action necessary,” he said of the allegations against the group. “Whether [the Greenpeace campaign] is constructive I would like other people to judge, not me.” THE END.