On May 18, 2015, Michelin celebrated the launch of a new joint venture to “produce natural, eco-friendly rubber” – a key component in Michelin’s tire products – in Indonesia.1 The press release promised that the flagship project, undertaken with Barito Pacific Group, would include the “reforestation of three concessions, representing a total surface area of 88,000 hectares, ravaged by uncontrolled deforestation” and touted a commitment to dedicate half of this area to “re-creating a natural environment and community crops.”...Much of the deforestation and destruction that Michelin promised to address had been committed by subsidiaries of a company within the Barito Pacific Group – Michelin’s very own partner in the new joint venture. These subsidiaries destroyed forests that were home to Indigenous peoples and endangered species, cleared land to make way for their rubber plantations and then sought public recognition – and investment – for a project to restore half of it.

The following pages document the findings of Mighty Earth’s investigation into that joint venture, the Royal Lestari Utama (RLU) Project. RLU covers an area of over 88,000 hectares (ha) across the provinces of Jambi and East Kalimantan, on the island of Sumatra. Lying adjacent to a large national park, the RLU concession areas in Jambi, the focus of this study, were identified as home to local communities and highly vulnerable forest-dependent Indigenous peoples and provide critical forest habitat for the endangered Sumatran elephant and critically endangered Sumatran tigers and reintroduced orangutans...

Michelin’s Response to Mighty Earth

In correspondence with Mighty Earth about our findings from LAJ 4, Michelin said the RLU Project only commenced concrete activities on the ground in March 2015. They claim “the region was undergoing massive deforestation at the time” and said earlier in 2006 “a permit to open a corridor road was granted in the [LAJ 4] area ... this led to a period of open access that resulted in the almost total destruction of the previously partly preserved forest area.” Michelin further stated that: “In the face of this large-scale ecological disaster ... the Government decided to grant southern buffer zone area as production forest areas and approached companies to actively manage and regain control of parts of the area. The Barito Pacific Group then designed a rubber plantation project to plant a rubber belt along the southern boundary of the Bukit Tigapuluh National Park, over a length of about 120 km, to create jobs and alternative sources of income to deforestation activities.”...