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.

More »

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.

More »

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 »

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.

More »