The leading eco-certifier for the palm oil trade, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), is facing scrutiny for a new standard that non-government organisations say could weaken protections for forests against palm oil expansion.
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Released last week, RSPO’s principles and criteria (P&C) for how palm oil can be sustainably grown include rules for safeguarding vulnerable smallholder farmers, respecting human rights, and avoiding deforestation and peatland degradation. RSPO certifies one-fifth of the world’s palm oil as sustainable and revises its P&C every five years. The P&C was last updated in 2018, when it prohibited deforestation.
Environmental watchdog Greenpeace noted that the new standard has dropped a definition of forests of high carbon value known as the High Carbon Stock (HCS) approach, a standard created by pulp and palm oil producers and NGOs in 2014 to protect forests of particularly high climate and biodiversity value from development.
The definition of HCS that RSPO members must apply is now based on a comparison with the amount of carbon that may be accumulated by oil palms that replace forest cleared for a plantation, the nonprofit said.
Greenpeace also said the standard weakens RSPO’s stance on deforestation by allowing forest clearance after November 2018, as long as remedy and compensation procedures are applied.
The new benchmark “misses [an] opportunity” for RSPO certification to be compliant with the European Union’s anti-deforestation law (EUDR), which has stipulated that no deforestation can occur after December 2020, Greenpeace noted.
EUDR, a law designed to weed deforestation out of European supply chains, was recently delayed following extensive lobbying from palm oil and other commodity producers. Europe is the largest market for RSPO-certified palm oil.
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It is concerning that RSPO has dropped a requirement for members to fully adhere to the High Carbon Stock toolkit – which sets strict requirements for all stages of new palm oil development.
Gemma Tillack, forest policy director, Rainforest Action Network
Greenpeace said that a “positive” element of RSPO’s new standard is that it continues to prohibit the development of carbon-rich peatlands, which have been systematically drained and burned to develop plantations in Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil grower.
The changes made to RSPO’s standard echo “the lobbying by many companies against the EUDR so they can continue destroying forest to expand plantations, and their general weakening of commitments to no deforestation, such as pushing out having ‘clean’ supply chains by 2025 or beyond,” said Greenpeace senior advisor, Grant Rosoman, in a media statement.
Concern over human rights
NGOs have also expressed concern over the initial removal of the requirement for free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) from the standard in an earlier draft. FPIC is a principle that enables Indigenous peoples and local communities to potentially withhold their consent for the development of their lands.
Though FPIC has been reintroduced to the standard, Achmad Surambo, director of nonprofit Sawit Watch, called for transparency over who was trying to remove FPIC from the standard in its previous draft and what their motivations are.
FPIC is difficult to audit, which might explain why palm oil companies are pushing for its exclusion, Indonesian palm oil trade title InfoSawit reported last week.
Forest Peoples Programmes, a human rights nonprofit, told Eco-Business that it was “alarmed” that FPIC had been removed from the earlier version of the standard, and from RSPO’s standard for independent smallholders.
The omission was in breach of international law and RSPO’s long-held policy commitment to uphold FPIC, said Angus MacInnes, project officer at Forest Peoples Programme.
MacInnes believes the re-introduction of FPIC followed pressure from RSPO’s social NGOs caucus.
Rainforest Action Network (RAN) said that RSPO needs to strengthen its standard to include explicit requirements for growers to remedy lands taken without FPIC in existing oil palm plantations.
“RSPO promises to ensure the adapted standard will have safeguards to protect Indigenous and local communities that are eligible for exemption to its tougher ‘no deforestation’ requirements, but for five years, it has failed to develop safeguards that are needed to provide assurances that communities will be protected from being exploited by palm oil companies looking to expand into high forest cover landscapes in frontier regions,” Gemma Tillack, forest policy director at RAN, told Eco-Business in a statement.
The standard makes no specific mention of waste palm oil dumping, an issue that materialised earlier this year when a palm oil vessel discharged a large quantity of the oil off the coast of Malaysia. However, the standard mandates the “responsible” disposal of waste and the development of waste recycling plan.
RSPO: No change to FPIC requirements, deforestation approach “refined”
In response to the criticism, RSPO said its standard has not reduced any of the requirements for FPIC and contains a “strengthened commitment” to human rights.
The organisation said it would continue to work with growers and social NGOs to strengthen how FPIC requirements are applied on the ground, “particularly in contentious areas where legacy issues prevail”.
RSPO said it was “refining” its approach to deforestation, by integrating its high conservation value and high carbon stock (HCV-HCSA) approach with a new framework of indicators for determining which ecosystems should be protected from development.
It has said the change recognised the “aspirational nature” of the conservation and climate indicators used in the 2018 P&C, and the updated standard addressed “implementation challenges”.
The organisation said it remains “closely aligned” with EUDR and would be rolling out a new digital traceability system that will allow RSPO members to incorporate EUDR-compliance geolocation data into their traceability records.
RSPO did not address Greenpeace’s concern that the standard enables conversion of forests as long as remediation and compensation measures are taken.
A study by Greenpeace in 2021 rated RSPO as the strongest among schemes that certify forest-risk commodities such as palm oil, soy, wood and cocoa, although the nonprofit concluded that none of the schemes, which included cocoa and coffee rater Fairtrade and wood certifier Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), have prevented ongoing deforesation and human rights abuses.
RSPO has “moderately strong” multi-stakeholder governance structures and is transparent, but its standards are often poorly implemented, and members have broken RSPO rules without penalties, the report noted.
The revised standard emerges three months after a coalition of NGOs called on the organisation to block Indonesia’s second largest palm oil producer, Astra Agro Lestari (AAL), from attaining membership. AAL has been called out for land-grabbing and growing palm oil inside a forest estate through subsidiaries.
Greenpeace’s global project leader for the Indonesia forest campaign Kiki Taufik said that RSPO should make certified member companies accountable for deforestation and other abuses at a corporate group level to address abuses by opaquely controlled ‘shadow’ companies.
Singapore-listed RSPO member First Resources was accused earlier this month of reneging on a long-held no-deforestation commitment through subsidiaries alleged to be involved with Indonesia’s controversial food estate programme, which is set to clear vast swathes of forest in south Papua.
