James Mulbah knows how forests work. After fleeing Liberia’s civil war, aged seven, he and his family lived as refugees in a forest village in Guinea for the next eight years, reliant on the environment for food, medicine and fuel. The trained sociologist is now putting that knowledge to good use in his native country.
Mulbah is part of the community affairs team at Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL), an oil palm developer whose main investor is Singapore-based giant Golden Agri-Resources. His job is to persuade local people to let the company plant oil palm on the land where they have subsisted for generations.
It’s a painstaking process, requiring several months of consultation and negotiation. The company has just signed its third agreement in Grand Kru County, covering some 1,800 hectares. In return, the two communities involved will receive an annual payment of $5 per hectare, jobs, scholarships, hand pumps for water and a slice of plantation for themselves. Schools and a road will be rehabilitated.
GVL is the first big company to start operations in Grand Kru, and its arrival stirs mixed emotions and sometimes false expectations, Mulbah told Thomson Reuters Foundation from its office there.
The key is to “give the local people power to take charge of their own development … instead of telling them ‘I came to change your life’”, he said. “The company is aware that we cannot employ everybody and we cannot give everything to the communities.”
GVL hasn’t always taken such a nuanced approach. In 2010, the Liberian government awarded it a 65-year concession to grow oil palm on some 350,000 hectares in the West African country’s southeast.
But after starting work in Sinoe County, it was criticised for failing to respect both community land rights and the planting procedures of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a not-for-profit association that runs an international certification scheme for ethical palm oil.
The UN Security Council even warned that animosity between local communities and GVL raised “a distinct possibility of land-related conflict”.
“The GVL concession is an example of a missed opportunity to integrate rural growth plans into one of the largest private sector investments in Liberia,” it said in a 2012 report.
Since then, the company’s attitude has changed. It now recognises it must gain what is called “free, prior and informed consent” (FPIC) from local people before the first oil palm tree is planted, Mulbah said.
That involves sitting down with communities, giving them clear information in their own language, mapping the area together, deciding which parts can be used, and then agreeing on the compensation they will receive.
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The actual culprits are the government-linked companies that are opening up forest areas, and have been doing things wrongly - causing pollution and other environmental problems
Lanash Thanda, head of Sabah Environmental Protection Association
Big promises
The shift in GVL’s approach is indicative of a wider transformation across the rapidly expanding international palm oil industry. Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil derived from the fruit of oil palms and is a globally traded agricultural commodity, widely used in food products like chocolate and margarine, as well as in cosmetics and biodiesel.
Since late 2013, some of the biggest growers and traders of palm oil - including Wilmar and Golden Agri-Resources - have made new promises or extended previous policies to guarantee by a certain date that their product will no longer cause deforestation, nor exploit workers and local people.
Those commitments have been matched by similar pledges from major manufacturers and retailers of consumer goods that use palm oil, such as Unilever, Procter and Gamble, Kellogg’s, Nestle and Ferrero. Many say they will use only palm oil certified by the RSPO, respect community rights, and shut out suppliers that plant on fragile peatland or cut down biodiverse forests storing large amounts of carbon.
Some have gone beyond this, indicating they will work with palm oil producers, including smallholders, to improve their practices. Unilever, for example, announced in November it would develop a programme in Indonesia - the biggest grower of palm oil - with government-owned plantation company PTPN III, the Sustainable Trade Initiative and the RSPO to help small, independent growers in North Sumatra increase their productivity and quality, their access to finance and their RSPO certification.
“We believe it is better to work with suppliers as a first step to persuade them and help them to move to more sustainable agricultural methods,” Unilever said by email, adding it has adopted the same approach in the fishing and tea sectors. “However, we will always take a firm stance with those suppliers that do not comply.”
The multinational is working with groups like Oxfam to build sustainable, smallholder-based supply chains for its raw materials “that provide improved quality crops and have positive developmental impacts”, it said.
Experts who have worked with companies that produce or use palm oil for the past decade, since the RSPO was set up in 2004, say the social impacts of the business are becoming more positive, partly thanks to pioneering efforts by some of the bigger firms.
Stateless children
Torben Venning is executive director of the Humana Child Aid Society, which runs around 130 learning centres for more than 12,000 children in eastern Malaysia’s Sabah province. Most are stateless, born to migrant workers from Indonesia and the Philippines employed on Borneo’s oil palm plantations. The children do not have the right to attend Malaysian schools.
Venning, a Danish teacher who launched his project in 1991, said the companies he works with - which provide about 70 per cent of Humana’s funding - have come to appreciate the need for decent labour conditions on their plantations.
Workers who once lived side by side in old wooden longhouses are now lodged in small family units. Last year, a minimum salary was introduced. And a growing number of plantation owners ensure their employees’ children get a primary-level education. “You take good care of the workers and they will tend to stay with you,” Venning said.
Since last year, the principles and criteria for RSPO certification stipulate that growers and millers should provide educational facilities where no public schools are available or accessible. But there’s a long way to go, because “thousands of children” living on plantations in West Africa, Latin America and Papua New Guinea still don’t attend class, and end up helping their parents gather oil palm fruit, Venning said.
Lanash Thanda, a lawyer who heads the Sabah Environmental Protection Association, agrees some of the region’s plantations have cleaned up their act, but it’s mainly those run by larger RSPO-certified producers selling to firms based in Europe or the United States. The two biggest export markets for palm oil are China and India, while a proportion of production is used domestically in Indonesia and Malaysia.
“The actual culprits are the government-linked companies that are opening up forest areas, and have been doing things wrongly - causing pollution and other environmental problems,” Thanda told Thomson Reuters Foundation from Malaysia.
Continue reading here on rising demand, questions unanswered and starting small-scale in sustainable palm oil.
