KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 20): SD Guthrie Bhd (KL:SDG) on Tuesday denied allegations that its subsidiaries or employees caused forest and land fires in Indonesia.
The allegations are not supported by credible evidence and do not reflect the facts established through its own ground checks that confirmed no active fires in any of its estates in Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil producer by acreage said in a statement.
“Guthrie also found no evidence that its subsidiaries or employees started the fires,” the statement read. The company did not specify which report it was responding to.
Toxic smog from ongoing massive wildfires in Indonesia has spread beyond its borders, blanketing the skies over Singapore and several Malaysian cities. Indonesia blamed the fires on natural phenomena during the El Niño weather conditions, while downplaying the scale of the disaster.
Jakarta-based WALHI, the country’s oldest and largest environmental advocacy organisation, named Sime Darby, SD Guthrie’s former name, as one of the companies suspected of causing forest and land fires.
SD Guthrie said it does not own, manage, or control some of the firms mentioned in public reports as its affiliates. The company also stressed its zero-burning policy across its operations since 1985, while pointing to its "no deforestation, no peat and no exploitation" commitment.
“When a fire is detected within or near its operational boundaries, the group’s operations will respond immediately, regardless of its source,” SD Guthrie said, noting that its Indonesian subsidiary Minamas Plantation has more than 1,000 trained fire-fighting personnel.
The effort is supported by drone and infrared monitoring across its plantations concession area and 322,000 hectares of surrounding community land, which together costs about RM800,000 each month to maintain and deploy, SD Guthrie highlighted.
Between January and September, its in-house firefighters extinguished over 2,400 fires, of which 2,376 incidents were on community land. “Their response to fires beyond Guthrie’s concession area should not be taken as evidence that the group caused them,” the company added.