The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is piloting new rules of its Shared Responsibility (SR) concept that will boost agricultural transparency. Tiur Rumondang, RSPO Indonesia Country Director, explains that while the SR concept has been part of the Members’ Code of Conduct for over five years now, stakeholders flagged that the SR concept needed to be revisited and developed further.

“Over the past 14 years or so, we have seen impressive growth in sustainable palm oil production from our members but demand has not quite been on par with supply. There were beliefs that buyers did not adhere to the same standards applicable to producers because there were no set rules in place,” Tiur explains.

“With the concept of shared responsibility, we want to encourage greater mobilization of efforts among all stakeholders in the supply chain to achieve market transformation and to reach RSPO’s shared vision of making sustainable palm oil the norm.”

RSPO presented its new criteria for the initiative in a virtual event with CNN Indonesia. With uptake of sustainable palm oil in Indonesia at just over 13 percent as of June, panellists from RSPO, Golden Agri Resources (GAR), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia and the Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) came together to discuss the key challenges and opportunities in driving market transformation in the world’s largest oil palm producing country. 

Commenting on the topic, GAR’s Managing Director for Sustainability and Strategic Stakeholder Engagement, Agus Purnomo, remarks: “This is becoming a significant burden only shouldered by oil palm farmers. We need to make sustainability actions a shared responsibility by all.”

Since the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) Trademark was launched in 2011, it has grown exponentially from 12 countries to 60 countries, and now appears on more than 400 consumer products.

Suppliers speak out
GAR has been a member of RSPO since April 2011 and has 270,000 hectares of RSPO certified oil palm plantation and a production capacity of up to 1.3 million tons of Crude Palm Oil (CPO). In addition to its RSPO commitments, GAR has been inviting independent factories and farmers that are not part of its supply chain to implement similar policies on sustainability.

“We have plantation data on around 80 percent of our suppliers. This data is important to assure our consumers that they are buying from plantations and factories that are committed for sustainability,” highlights Purnomo.

Last October, the Board of Governors of the RSPO approved landmark rules for SR. The new rules state that RSPO Consumer Goods Manufacturers and Retailer members who buy sustainable palm oil are to increase their uptake by an additional 15 percent (from the previous year’s baseline which will be the 2019 ACOP) for the first year of SR implementation. For instance, if uptake was 10 percent in the previous year, it should be 25 percent for year one.

In support of the approach, WWF Indonesia Head of Market Transformation, Aditya Bayunanda, said: “Joint efforts are needed now more than ever to ensure that oil palm growers who produce oil palm sustainably receive necessary benefits and that consumers then use their purchasing power to further incentivize producers, including smallholders.” 

WWF has been promoting certified and responsibly-sourced palm oil products both domestically and internationally and also shares relevant information on wher companies can source sustainable palm oil from in order to support market players. 

Most consumers unaware of palm oil ubiquity
Tulus Abadi, YLKI Chairman, added that the majority of consumers in Indonesia are not aware of the use of palm oil in common supermarket products. 

“Most Indonesian consumers only know palm oil as a cooking oil and the idea of sustainable consumption is not a major concern for them. This happens because there is no education from industry players to consumers relating to product knowledge and there are no clear policies for this matter.”

“We encourage the cooking oil industry to ensure that cooking oil products are environmentally friendly, both from the upstream to the downstream. It must guarantee that there are no violations of labor rights and human rights among other key sustainability criteria,” he concludes.

Sustaining palm and planet
In recent headlines, Unilever teamed up with US-based tech company Orbital Insight to boost palm oil sourcing transparency. The collaboration is piloting technology that uses geolocation data to help identify and map the individual farms and plantations that are most likely to be supplying the palm oil mills in Unilever’s extended supply chain.

In March, a fifth of the malaria risk related to deforestation hotspots was found to be driven by the international trade of exports of palm oil, next to coffee, soybean, cocoa and beef. The study is touted as the first to link global demand for deforestation-related goods to a rise in malaria risk in humans and consequently voices its support for sustainable land ownership in developing countries.

PepsiCo released an in-depth global policy in February on sourcing sustainable palm oil to help address the challenges often associated with the popular edible oil crop and its widespread use in the food industry. Updating previous commitments, the new global policy covers the whole supply chain, including production sources and direct suppliers.

Evidently, however, the solution to eradicating deforestation is not the removal of palm oil from product formulations completely, but investing more in improving supply chain visibility. RSPO CEO Datuk Darrel Webber previously warned against the unforeseen sustainability and biodiversity impacts that may come from switching to, what he calls, less sustainable edible oils than palm oil.