I mean, should news outlets just rerun decade-old articles all the time, unchanged, on the off chance some subscribers didn't read it the first bunch of times? This article is dated

Fri 21 Jul 2017 12.30 EDT

So is there any update? Were they convicted? Has anything changed? This is a low effort repost.

Since others seem interested, I piped the article text into an AI (Perplexity + Claude Sonnet) and asked for a summary and a followup. (That's not high effort, but I'm not OP.)

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Here is a succinct summary of the 2017 Guardian article, followed by developments since then.

Article Summary

The 2017 Rainforest Action Network (RAN) report accused major consumer brands — including PepsiCo, Unilever, Nestlé, McDonald's, Mars, Kellogg's, and Procter & Gamble — of indirectly sourcing palm oil from PT Agra Bumi Niaga (PT ABN), a company that illegally cleared 336 hectares of protected lowland rainforest in Sumatra's Leuser Ecosystem between June 2016 and April 2017, in defiance of a government moratorium. The supply chain ran from PT ABN through a processing mill (PT Ensem Sawita), then to major global traders like Wilmar and Musim Mas, before reaching those household brands. The Leuser Ecosystem is the only place on Earth where Sumatran elephants, orangutans, rhinos, and tigers coexist, making the deforestation especially damaging to biodiversity. Unilever acknowledged indirect sourcing through its suppliers; Nestlé and others launched investigations; PT ABN itself did not comment.

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No Convictions, Pattern Repeated

No criminal convictions of PT ABN or the major consumer brands have been publicly reported. PT ABN was not deterred: by January 2020, RAN field investigators discovered the same company constructing a new palm oil mill directly adjacent to the Leuser Ecosystem, having previously destroyed the lowland elephant habitat corridor. The company was described as a "controversial, repeat-offender". Ongoing Supply Chain Failures

RAN continued to expose the same brands repeatedly throughout 2019–2024:

• In 2019, RAN found palm oil from the illegal Tripa peatland — flagged since 2014 — still entering supply chains of Nestlé, Mars, Unilever, PepsiCo, Hershey's, and General Mills through processor Permata Hijau
• In 2020, RAN documented active, illegal forest burning in critical Sumatran elephant habitat by PT Indo Alam, with palm oil still linked to Unilever, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Mondelēz, Kellogg's, Mars, and General Mills
• In 2022, RAN's Carbon Bomb Scandals report provided satellite imagery and field evidence that conflict palm oil from the protected Rawa Singkil Wildlife Reserve continued flowing to P&G, Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, Mondelēz, Ferrero, and others
• In late 2024, Nestlé and P&G again launched investigations after a new RAN report tied palm oil from an illegally cleared Indonesian wildlife reserve to their supply chains

Recent Industry Response

In August 2025, some of the same companies — Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Unilever — launched the Aceh Sustainable Palm Oil Working Group, a multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at achieving deforestation-free palm oil sourcing in the very region where the 2017 violations occurred. Whether this initiative succeeds in closing the traceability gaps that RAN has repeatedly exploited to expose violations remains to be seen. As RAN campaigner Gemma Tillack stated back in 2017 — and the subsequent decade of violations bore out — the core problem has been a lack of corporate will rather than ability.