The area is subject to various overlapping concessions, including preliminary licences for conversion to palm-oil plantations.
It was a smallish buyer and a member of the RSPO, with a palm-oil policy in line with the industry standard.
He gave it up to set up a small trading company and later a sugar and palm-oil venture with Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok.
Indonesia's decision to stop clearing, which will slow the growth of its palm-oil industry, was not just for the good of the planet.
Another problem is that the RSPO has struggled to create any effective action on setting standards for greenhouse-gas emissions associated with palm-oil plantations.
He and his family still own a palm-oil estate and mill in Sumatra and he and his brother have a pulp mill in Kalimantan.
Indonesian companies such as Sinar Mas, a big palm-oil exporter, say the central bank has sounded them out on their readiness to do so.
The Surat Thani biomass plant in Thailand uses waste trimmings from six palm-oil mills to create more than 70 megawatts of power each year.
In Indonesia this would mean putting palm-oil plantations not on forest land but on degraded land, of which it has perhaps 40m hectares available.
It also manages companies for example, Zambia's Chilanga Cement, in which it also has a majority stake, and palm-oil ventures in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Thailand.
His other major agribusiness asset is pt Tidar Kerinci Agung, a palm-oil producer in West Sumatra that began as a joint venture with Malaysia's Robert Kuok, who has since exited.
The NGO made fresh allegations: that SMART, a palm-oil producer, a member of the RSPO and a part of Sinar Mas, an Indonesian conglomerate, was involved in illegal deforestation and clearance of peatland.
Criticism of biofuels is certainly fair game (such as palm-oil-based biodiesel from Indonesia's rainforest, which actually hurts the environment more than it helps it), but there is an obligation to stick to the facts.
Gavin Neath, senior vice-president of communications and sustainability at Unilever, says the problems started several years ago when Greenpeace published a report that made a number of accusations about some of its palm-oil suppliers.
But the Japanese pulled out of the Taiyo fish cannery at Noro, timber exports were hit by the Asian slump, Ross Mining closed its Gold Ridge mine and Guadalcanal's palm-oil plantations have been abandoned.
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Mr al-Bukhary, a close friend of the prime minister's, has built an extraordinary empire in a the five years since the crisis, including Malaysia's fast-growing new container port at Tanjung Pelepas, a hotel and property group, Pernas, mining companies, power companies, palm-oil companies and much else, including a controlling stake in the Bakun dam on the island of Borneo.
Malaysia is the world's largest producer of palm oil--a cheaper substitute for vegetable or sunflower oil--and it is also blessed with an abundance of forestry, fertile agricultural land and minerals like copper and iron ore.
And the price of one of its main products--palm oil, widely used for cooking in tropical Africa--also went haywire.
Analysts, though, point to strong profit growth from Genting's palm oil plantations and oil-and-gas-production business.
Last year a Dutch study found that draining Indonesian swamps to make way for oil-palm plantations resulted in 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions for each tonne of palm oil produced, by speeding up the decomposition of the peaty soil.
An all-party scrutiny committee agreed new payments for renewable energy - including palm oil.
Yet these tracts "give way to rubber and oil-palm plantations owned by untouchable companies, " just as the Kapuas river teems with logs felled by similarly connected operators.
It can then be turned into plantations growing palm oil, rubber and fast-growing trees for the booming pulp-and-paper industry.
Land-use planning for oil palm, for example, might involve not only the ministry of forestry but also those of agriculture, finance, energy and infrastructure as well as the army and the police.
The secret, picked up from his wife as she cooked vegetable tempura, was to flash-fry the cooked noodles in palm oil.
In an expansionary budget containing goodies for almost every industry, the government has imposed a windfall-profits tax on producers of palm oil.
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Orange juice, corn, soybeans and palm oil have all stretched to near three-year highs in the past week or so.
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That immense forest is pockmarked in places by isolated lighter-green squares, where the trees have been felled and oil palm planted.
Bakrie-controlled companies cover the breadth of Indonesia's economy, including mining, oil and gas, palm oil, property, telecommunications and finance.
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