Criteria for ‘Sustainable Palm Oil’ Definition

THE Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) will come up with

internationally accepted guidelines on the definition of sustainable palm

oil.

The RSPO is a palm oil alliance pact whose members cover the entire

spectrum of the industry, from oil palm growers to consumer goods

manufacturers, processors and traders, retailers, manufacturers, banks

and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Malaysian Palm Oil Association chief executive Azizi Meor Ngah said the

RSPO’s set of guidelines, called “principles and criteria”, will be the

common denominator to harmonise all the different palm oil- related

standards in the world.

RSPO president Jan Kees Vis said the 28-member RSPO will meet in

Singapore in November to ratify the principles and criteria.

“After that, members will implement the set of principles and criteria

on a trial basis for the next two years, and during that time we will see

about the need to develop it further,” Kees Vis told reporters in Kuala

Lumpur yesterday.

Palm oil has grown rapidly in the past 30 years and each industry down

the supply chain, such as a refiner in the Netherlands or a grower in

Malaysia, operates on its own without conforming to a common industry

benchmark.

This has given rise to various interpretations of sustainable palm oil,

and the RSPO plans to unify them.

For instance, a palm oil refiner in the UK may define oil palm grown in

Malaysia as sustainable but not in Columbia, while a plantation company

in Malaysia is seen as environment-friendly by an Indonesia- based NGO

but not by a US NGO.

A bank from Europe may link palm oil with the destruction of forest,

orang utan and haze in Malaysia when in fact it happens only in

Indonesia. The RSPO’s principles and criteria will put all these

allegations to rest.

Due to the various interpretations and lack of communication among palm

oil players, the commodity was hit by the anti-palm oil campaign in the

1980s.