Helen Buckland, UK director of the Sumatran Orangutan Society, reports on developments at the recent Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil meeting...
It's no secret that the palm oil industry is responsible for massive deforestation in Indonesia, but it's now gone some way towards acknowledging the value of rainforests and how vital they are for conserving endangered species, including orangutans.
With so little habitat remaining in Sumatra and Borneo, it is vital to preserve even degraded forests to ensure the survival of orangutans in the wild.
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is an industry group which regulates certified sustainable palm oil according to a set of principles developed by palm oil companies, traders, buyers, retailers, banks and social and environmental organisations, including SOS, designed to limit negative environmental and social impacts.
An area of much debate is: how do you define forest that needs protecting? Primary rainforest is obviously important, but so are secondary forests. These are areas which have regrown after being burnt or cut down but have not yet developed all the complexities of primary old-growth forests, which can take hundreds or thousands of years.
Even really degraded areas such as forests which have been heavily logged are important, and many scientific studies show that degraded forests are worth protecting.
So when we heard that RSPO-approved auditors - responsible for evaluating whether plantations should be certified - had stated that secondary and degraded forests "have little meaning in relation to wildlife and the environment", we felt the need to disagree. We demanded that the RSPO acknowledge that secondary and degraded forests can be important for conservation, overturning the perception that only primary forests should be saved from the bulldozers.
The annual RSPO meeting was held in Jakarta last week, and members voted in favour of our proposal. This means that the RSPO must now publish a position statement recognising the value of secondary and degraded forests, and make sure that plantation companies and auditors don't just write them off as dead wood.
Whilst we're pleased with the result of the vote, the RSPO is a voluntary initiative, representing less than half of Indonesian palm oil companies, and not all RSPO-member companies have been following the rules. To really safeguard these forests, the Indonesian government needs to recognise their value as well.
The negotiations between Indonesia and Norway, surrounding the two-year moratorium on the conversion of forests to plantations, provide an opportunity to ensure that all standing forests are evaluated for their conservation value. The RSPO vote in Jakarta shows that even palm oil companies, more typically associated with the clearance rather than protection of forests, support such a move.
And there have been several other notable outcomes from the meeting. The first palm oil smallholders scheme has received certification, and the RSPO has launched a new trademark symbol, which will start appearing on the packaging of items containing CSPO from early 2011.
This should encourage retailers and manufacturers to make strong commitments to only using certified sustainable palm oil, especially considering the new legislation currently going through the European parliament, which will make it impossible for palm oil to hide behind the innocuous "vegetable oil" label on ingredients lists.
However, all this progress has been overshadowed by a move which has already been labeled by many as counter-productive. The Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association (Gapki) and the Indonesian Palm Oil Board, backed by the government, are encouraging their members to abandon the RSPO, and have launched a new certification scheme, specifically for Indonesian palm oil - ISPO (Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil).
Why? Because Gapki has said that the RSPO principles will impede the development of the industry. This attitude doesn't give me much confidence in their grasp of the tenets of sustainability. Their sole focus on profit, at the expense of people and planet, means that ISPO will only damage Indonesia's palm oil industry reputation even further. And these days that's getting tough to do.
