Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

On my flight back from Palangka Raya, I sit next to a representative from Wilmar, an Malaysian company trading in palm oil. He´s on his way to a biodiversity forum of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in Jakarta. This forum is highly controversial , dubbed by some as greenwashers, by others as laudable, realistic economic initiative to render the production of palm oil less destructive. My interlocutor tells me, that the reason for his company to join the Roundtable was the difficulty to penetrate the EU market without it. Only 5% out of Wilmar´s about 2 million hectars are yet certified. In 5 to 7 years, they hope all plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia to be certified. But Wilmar also holds concessions outside these countries, in Africa (Ivory Coast, Uganda), and there no talk about including them in the certification process...Sounds like the certified oil is only destinated for the European market and in parallel the other growing markets, like China will be served by the non-certified palm oil.

Certification includes a huge number of criteria and indicators to be met. Wilmar tries not to repeat the mistakes of the past for instance by creating a buffer zone between its plantations and the water sheds, I am told. In Kalimantan, they have just decided not to touch 2000 hectars of land of particular ecological importance. Wilmar does not plan to buy new concessions either, but they already hold concessions for 200 000 hectars in Kalimantan, of which they only use half up to now. So they could still double their plantations....Still, the future lies in improving the yields of the existing plantations by better water management, using better species, more effective milling, according to my interlocutor.