Here in Riau, Indonesia, signs of the struggle to save the last of Sumatra’s forest is everywhere. Daily, the papers cover stories of timber and oil palm companies destroying forests, engaging in corruption, driving land conflicts, sponsoring violence, and marginalizing indigenous peoples.

Today, on the way to a meeting with the local NGO Elang, I passed villagers from the Kampar Peninsula, a carbon-rich and biodiverse ecoystem that is under attack by Sinar Mas’ oil palm operations and their timber division Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), on a hunger strike.

In front of the provincial parliament building, a group of men and women from the village of Kijang Kejo have set up a plastic tarp and banner, announcing to Riau’s elected officials that they will not eat until the oil palm plantation PT Arindo Tri Sejahtera, who stole their land and then paid thugs to kill three of their family members, is brought to justice.

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On the first day of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) Pak Jamaluddin was quiet. He said the air conditioning of Kuala Lumpor gave him the flu. He seemed lost among the groups of palm producers, with their Blackberries and dark suits.

Exhausted from the canoe rides, bad roads, the concrete maze of Jakarta, and the foreign environment of a Kuala Lumpor convention hall, I found Pak Jamaluddin on the second day of the RSPO outside, sitting cross legged on the sidewalk. He waved me over, and I sat with him. He leaned over to me as he whispered: “It is over. Our forest is gone. Duta Palma has flattened the last of it. We are finished.”

A few months before, I visited with Pak Jamaluddin in his village of Semunying Jaya. Deep in the interior of Borneo, his village had become a hotspot of rainforest destruction and human rights abuse at the hands of the palm oil producer Duta Palma.

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The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was founded to create a path towards sustainability in the palm oil industry. A voluntary process, oil palm producers, traders, buyers, and NGO’s have joined up to find an alternative to the massive forest destruction, social conflict, and climate chaos the booming palm oil industry is bringing to the world’s rainforests. But eight years into the process, there is still nothing sustainable about the palm oil the RSPO endorses.

Early on, the RSPO identified accountability and transparency as key criteria to reduce the palm oil industry’s corrupt, dirty, and dangerous practices. Reflecting such, the first criteria for joining the RSPO are commitments to transparency.

But even a basic level of transparency is too much to ask from the USA’s largest producer and trader of palm oil, Cargill. Cargill was quick to sign up for the RSPO and to claim their support for the RSPO’s criteria. But when it comes to actually following the RSPO’s criteria for sustainable palm oil, Cargill is a non-starter. Hiring a questionable audit firm, Cargill has managed to pay its way into RSPO certification without living up to RSPO criteria.

This week, I attended the RSPO’s annual conference with two victims of Cargill’s oil palm operations in Indonesia. These community members, one of them the head of his small Indonesian village, traveled thousands of miles to meet Cargill face to face, to fight for the land Cargill has taken away from them. More »

Contrary to a number of sensationalist media reports leading up to this year’s Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil, the RSPO is not breaking up.

At the core of the controversy has been the effort to include a commitment by all members of the RSPO to reduce their Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. After two years of meetings, the Malaysian and Indonesian producers managed to block any such commitment. It was a disappointing moment for the RSPO, and a lost opportunity to address one of the most serious issues of oil palm production.

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The RSPO is the world’s largest annual meeting of oil palm industry, environmentalists, human rights advocates, and, most importantly, community members. Today, I watched as a community member from Borneo stood up in front of oil palm producers, NGOs, and technocrats, identified himself as a victim of oil palm expansion, and tore apart the falsity that some of the world’s richest businessmen desperately want us to believe; the falsity that oil palm helps the world’s poor:

“They say oil palm is development. They say Malaysia has cars and big cities because of oil palm. But it is not oil palm, it is from other things, like our oil and our logging. Giant companies, most of them Malaysian, ignore customary land rights and take our land out from under us. They develop it into oil palm. They use only foreign workers, or people from Kuala Lumpur to drive the trucks and run the offices. For the day laborers, they will not even hire us local people, because we are Malaysians and have some basic rights. So they hire Indonesians who have come here illegally and have no rights, no one to protect them from the bad working conditions and horrible pay. The Malay people, who live near us, they all get a few hectares of land from the Company to have their own oil palm, but rather than work that land they too hire Indonesians. The government, using their oil and gas and timber money gives these Malay government jobs too, so even though they live in the countryside they can buy cars. The owners of the Company get rich, so rich. Then they take that money and invest it in oil palm in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where they can do whatever they want, there are no laws there. And they get even richer. More »

A new, hard hitting, RAN case study on Cargill’s oil palm operations in PNG, ‘Commodity Colonialism’, is now available for download HERE.

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a nation that does not easily fit with our society’s dominant ideas of development, property, and conservation. Many Papuans have little interaction with the cash economy; although categorized by development indexes as poor, these Papuans have never known food scarcity or landless poverty.  Individual land holdings are rare – most land is held in communal agreements based on complex family, tribal, and political ties – but the nation has seemed to avoid the everyman for themselves, tragedy-of-the-commons dynamic Western thinkers have predicted for such communal agreements. For generations, PNG did not have a single national park or government protected conservation area, but the country has resisted the devastating rates of forest destruction that has plagued other tropical nations.

PNG’s unique geography, people, and ecosystems just do not fit very well into Western models of just about anything. But, in a trend seen all over the world, that is not stopping the World Bank and multinational agribusiness giant Cargill from forcing PNG to accept their investment-extraction-profit model.

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Here at RAN the agribusiness campaign is hard at work pressuring US agribusiness companies, with a  focus on the massive privately held company Cargill, to stop their dirty and dangerous practices of developing oil palm plantations in the rich tropical rainforests of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea.

Cargill has a total of five oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia, divided into more than twenty estates that have been carved out of the world’s most diverse and  carbon rich rainforests.

Because Cargill is both the largest supplier of palm oil to the US from Indonesia and the largest importer of palm oil into the US, we at RAN have a strong position to push the multinational to clean up their actions and adopt a global forest policy. Our impact over the past few months has been seen in the company agreeing to a series of three meetings with RAN running up to the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil in November.

But as with all the world’s natural resources, China has increasingly become the most dominant oil palm consumer nation. Too cold and dry to produce the crop on their own soil, Chinese business and government has turned to Indonesia to feed their demand for the cheap cooking oil and input for processed foods with so many ecological and social consequences.

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Dr Yusof Basiron is the CEO of the Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC), a lobbying group that supports the oil palm industry in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

Dr. Basiron is been working closely with the agricultural ministries of Malaysia and Indonesia, pushing for more tropical forest to be flattened and burned to make way for oil palm expansion. The Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture has recently announced a plan to double Indonesia’s crude palm oil production by 2020.

The negative environmental and social impacts of palm oil have gained major international attention in recent years, and while the evidence has emerged that oil palm is a danger to the world’s tropical forests and forest peoples, Dr. Basiron has continued to be a high-profile defender of the oil palm industry.

He is a colorful character known for his willingness to say just about anything. Here is a roundup of some of his uglier and more inaccurate statements, with referenced responses:

Basiron Fiction 1:

“Orang utans living near oil palm plantations were observed to regularly visit the plantations to feed on loose oil palm fruitlets and benefit from an all year round availability of a healthy food source which is naturally rich in vitamin A and E, giving the orang utans a healthy shining coat.”

Fact:

The United Nations Environment Program has called oil palm plantations a critical threat to orangutan populations, destroying the endangered primate’s already reduced forest habitats. Orangutans are commonly killed as pests in oil palm plantations; moving and graphic depictions of orangutans killed by oil palm plantations are in the free and download-able film ‘Green’.

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David Dellatore has faced much criticism for his willingness to work with palm oil companies.  NGO’s on the ground in Indonesia face a very different reality than advocacy groups far from the jungle, who tend to call for boycotts of environmentally damaging palm oil, or demand that palm oil be phased out of all consumer products.  For a small NGO like the Orangutan Information Center, where Dellatore works, securing funding for their activities, such as caring for orphaned orangutans or reforesting small patches of Gunung Leuser National Park, is always a challenge, and oil palm companies have plenty of cash on hand. The general consensus of local NGO’s in Indonesia, which is the world’s largest palm oil producer commanding 40% of the global oil palm market, is that oil palm plantations are a fact of life in Indonesia, and conservation groups must work hand-in-hand with oil palm companies.

So the meeting of conservation groups and palm oil companies this week in the Malaysian province of Sabah was not a surprise.  The oil palm industry is a giant in both Malaysia and Indonesia, and forest conservation groups believe they can make big gains in forest and wildlife protections if they convince the industry as a whole to adapt forest and forest people friendly policies.

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The Rainforest Agribusiness campaign team attended the Natural Products Expo East in Boston, Massachusetts, where we participated in two very successful events entitled “Little Seed. Big Problem. Bold Solution” in coordination with Seventh Generation to expose the problems with palm oil and share what we are doing collectively to reduce our impact on the world’s tropical rainforests, communities and the climate. We are calling on companies to be market leaders by taking supply chain accountability and adopting responsible policies and practices. This could include making a public commitment to action by joining the 45 companies who’ve signed RAN’s pledge to protect rainforests, communities and the climate; taking internal and supply chain actions that create transparency; helping with RSPO reform and implementation; and advocating for change in the global palm oil industry and in the underlying causes of deforestation.

You can watch the public event featuring the following panel of distinguished speakers moderated by Simran Sethi, award-winning environmental journalist: Jeffrey Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation; Michael Besancon, Global Vice President of Purchasing, Distribution and Marketing of Whole Foods Market; Leila Salazar-Lopez, Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign Director; and Matilda Pilacapio, land owner and human rights advocate from Papua New Guinea working to strengthen traditional agricultural systems in response to Cargill’s expanding oil palm plantations in PNG.

Matilda kicked off the event by sharing personal stories and photos of the impacts of palm oil on her land in the Milne Bay Province and the traditional communities of PNG. Then, I followed by sharing info about the global reach of palm oil and the global need to take action. I also showed a short clip of GREEN, a moving documentary which tells the story about the corporate conversion of rainforests in Indonesia for palm oil, tropical wood and paper through the eyes of one of the palm oil industry’s victims – a dying orangutan. As you may already know, almost 90% of orangutan habitat has already disappeared. If current trends of deforestation continue, the orangutan could be the first great ape to go extinct in the near future.

We’re working to stop this destruction by exposing and pressuring Cargill, the biggest importer of palm oil into the United States, and by working with market leaders, like Seventh Generation and Whole Foods, who are making commitments to environmentally and socially responsible palm oil.

Beyond signing our pledge to protect rainforests, communities and the climate, these companies have created action plans and committed to sourcing 100% identity preserved, fully-traceable “sustainable” palm oil by 2012; support a palm oil moratorium; and have agreed to call on industry peers to do the same, among other things. Seventh Generation has taken it one step further and has agreed to mobilize their customers and peers to take action on climate change legislation by writing to President Obama and his lead climate negotiator Todd Stern to demand that they ensure that UN REDD respects Indigenous rights and protects rainforests from palm oil plantations. You can take action too, by going to our website and signing the letter.

As mentioned above, 45 companies have now signed RAN’s pledge and have committed to developing an action plan to source more socially and environmentally responsible palm oil. Since there are very few examples of socially and environmentally responsible palm oil, organic and/or RSPO certified palm oil, there’s a long way to go to achieving success. Success begins with a commitment, however, so were encouraging more companies to join us in taking action to protect rainforests, communities and the climate from the destructive and unsustainable use of palm oil that currently exists.

In coming weeks, we’ll be exposing and pressuring some of the biggest suppliers and importers, beginning with Cargill, to take responsibility for their role in rainforest destruction for palm oil. Keep tuned in for more info!

Leila Salazar-Lopez
Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign Director