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earth's most diverse rainforest fast becoming paper

foe england, wales and northern ireland

The Indonesian pulp and paper company, APRIL, is clear-cutting an area of rainforest recently discovered by scientists to be the most biodiverse lowland rainforest on earth, according a report released by FoE England, Wales and Northern Ireland in February. The Tesso Nilo rainforest is home to a large number of endangered species, including tigers, elephants, gibbons and tapirs. APRIL's rainforest paper is being marketed all around the world.

FoE's investigation into APRIL reveals that since starting operations in 1995, the vast majority of the timber sent to its pulp mill has been sourced by clear-cutting Indonesian rainforest. APRIL has already cleared at least 220,000 hectares of Indonesian rainforest, and admits that it will be destroying at least another 140,000 hectares of rainforest over the next six years. The company has also been involved in a number of high profile land disputes with Indigenous Peoples.
APRIL sells its paper all over the world, mainly under the PaperOne brand. UPM-Kymmene, the Finnish pulp and paper giant is also buying a huge quantity of APRIL's rainforest pulp for its Changshu paper mill in China.

Friends of the Earth is calling on paper merchants and retailers to cancel their orders of APRIL's PaperOne paper until APRIL can independently prove that it has ended is destructive activities.

Paper Tiger, Hidden Dragons can be read on-line at /publications/forests/aprilfools.pdf .