Asian Agri has been at the forefront of fire prevention efforts since 1994, when we became one of the first palm oil companies in Indonesia to ban clearing land by burning.
In 2016 the company launched the Fire-Free Village Program (FFVP) to work with communities surrounding our plantations to encourage them to prevent fire on their land. The same year, Asian Agri was among the founding members of the Fire-Free Alliance (FFA)
The FFA is a voluntary multi-stakeholder group comprising forestry and agriculture companies which works with NGOs and other partners to resolve Indonesia’s persistent fire and haze problems arising from land burning, primarily through a fire and haze prevention approach.
Besides Asian Agri, members of the FFA currently include APRIL, Wilmar International Limited, Musim Mas, IDH, PM.Haze, Sime Darby and IOI.
The FFA is dedicated to supporting the Indonesian Government’s commitment to a haze-free ASEAN by 2020.
As part of its on-going efforts, the FFA has expanded fire prevention outreach to more than 200 villages, covering at least 1.5 million hectares of land in various parts of Indonesia.
Among the projects that FFA members run with participating villages are “no-burn reward” programs, which reward villages who have no forest fires, and programs which recruit individuals from local communities as fire prevention advocates and fire suppression specialists at the village level.
Besides providing suitable agricultural alternatives to fire for land management activities, FFA members also develop a range of community awareness tools which focus on raising awareness about the unsuitable use of fire and the impacts of burning.
Membership of FFA enables Asian Agri to share best practices from our FFVP with other stakeholders, and to learn from their own experiences. In 2016, five out of the villages which participated in Asian Agri’s FFVP pilot project achieved fire-free success. FFA Member’s Review 2017 report can be accessed here.
As of December 2017, Asian Agri partnered with 16 villages (nine in Riau and seven in Jambi) in its FFVP implementation efforts within these provinces.
In 2018, Asian Agri will continue to focus its efforts on assisting the 16 participating villages under its FFVP.
It will also be aiming to raise awareness among school students at these villages about the importance of sustaining fire-free villages.
