Berita Pers Response to The Forest Trust statement on 19 May 2015

Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) and The Forest Trust (TFT) have collaborated closely for the past four years since the development, announcement and implementation of our Forest Conservation Policy (FCP) and Social and Community Engagement Policy (SCEP). Over that period, we have made good progress towards meeting our commitments including improving our Sustainability SOPs, increasing the capacity of our staff on sustainability management and strengthening our stakeholder engagements.

The recently announced TFT suspension is for the upstream operations of PT SMART Tbk., a subsidiary of GAR, while the partnership to work on the downstream operations will continue. We acknowledge that there have been implementation challenges with our FCP and SCEP. We are committed to addressing the issues identified by TFT. We are pleased that TFT will be working with our management team to help produce an action plan to address the issues and ensure that our FCP implementation remains ontrack.

We are currently reorganizing our sustainability management and implementation team. As part of this, we recently appointed Agus Purnomo to be GAR’s new Managing Director for Sustainability and Strategic Stakeholder Engagement. Mr. Purnomo has previously held positions for the government, multilateral institutions as well as international and national NGOs, focusing on sustainable development issues.

The protection of high conservation value areas and high carbon stock forest is central to our ambition to be a leader in the zero-deforestation movement. So is strong social and community engagement and the implementation of social principles throughout our supply chain. We re-commit to leading our industry’s sustainability efforts, as the first Indonesian oil palm company to commit to zero deforestation. We will keep stakeholders regularly updated on our progress.